DNA-schade achter longkanker in kaart

Het Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute heeft de genetischeschade in kaart kunnen brengen van twee patienten met long- enmelonoma huidkanker. “This is a fundamental moment in cancerresearch. From here on in we will think about cancers in a verydifferent way,” aldus Professor Mike Stratton, die de leidingheeft van het kanker genoom project. 

“Today for the first time, in two individual cancers, a melanomaand a lung cancer, we have provided the complete list ofabnormalities in DNA in each of those two cancers. We now seeuncovered all the forces that have generated that cancer and we nowsee all the genes that are responsible for driving those twocancers.”

“Now that we have these comprehensive complete catalogues ofmutations on individual cancers, we will be able to see how eachcancer developed, what were the exposures, what were theenvironmental factors and that’s going to be key for ourunderstanding generally of how cancers develop,” zegt professorStratton. “And for our individual patients, we will see all thegenes that are abnormal and are driving each cancer and that’sreally critical, because that will tell us which drugs are likelyto have an effect on that particular cancer and which are not.”

Peter Campbell noemt het aantal ontdekte mutaties -33,345 voor melanoma en 22,910 voor longkanker- “remarkable. It is amazing what you can see in thesegenomes,” zegt hij op de website van Nature.Aangezien de meeste mutaties gerelateerd kunnen worden aan deimpact van bepaalde chemische producten, zoals die intabaksrook, geeft dit aan dat deze kankertypen te voorkomen zijn.”Every pack of cigarettes is like a game of Russianroulette. Most of those mutations will land where nothinghappens in the genome and won’t do major damage, but every once ina while they’ll hit a cancer gene.”