Gene changes mapped in two deadly cancers
December 17, 2009
Kate Kelland
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
LONDON–Scientists have identified all the changes in cells of two deadly cancers to produce the first entire cancer gene maps and say the findings mark a "transforming moment" in their understanding of the disease.
The studies by international scientists and Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute are the first comprehensive descriptions of tumour cell mutations and lay bare all the genetic changes behind melanoma skin cancer and lung cancer.
"What we are seeing today is going to transform the way that we see cancer," Mike Stratton of the Sanger Institute's cancer genome project told a briefing in London. "We have never seen cancer revealed in this form before."
The scientists sequenced all the DNA from both tumour tissue and normal tissue from a melanoma patient and a lung cancer patient using a technology called massively parallel sequencing. By comparing the cancer sequences with the healthy ones, they were able to pick up all the changes specific to cancer.
The lung tumour carried more than 23,000 mutations and the melanoma had more than 33,000.
Peter Campbell, also of the Sanger Institute, said the lung cancer study suggests a typical smoker develops one mutation for every 15 cigarettes smoked and the damage starts with the first puff. Lung cancer kills around 1 million people worldwide each year and 90 per cent of cases are caused by smoking.
"These catalogues of mutations are telling us about how the cancer has developed – so they will inform us on prevention – and they include all the drivers, which tell us about the processes that are disrupted in the cancer cell which we can try and influence through our treatments," Stratton said.
But the scientists said identifying all the drivers, the mutations that cause cells to become cancerous, would take far more work and it could be several years yet before any new targets are found for the development of new cancer drugs.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
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