Global first entire cancer gene maps produced: Nature

BEIJING, Dec. 17 (Xinhuanet) -- The global first entire cancer gene maps, which contain all the change in cells of two deadly cancers, have been produced under international cooperation, according to the Nature journal as quoted by media reports Thursday.

This marks a "transforming moment" in the medical understanding of the disease, said the researchers.

The maps 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."

Through sequencing 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, and then comparing the cancer sequences with the healthy ones, the scientists 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.

"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.

However, researchers said it has a long way to go to find the reasons that cause normal cells mutate into cancerous ones.

"Somewhere among the mutations we have found lurk those that drive the cells to become cancerous," said Andy Futreal, who worked on in the Nature journal. "Tracking them down will be our major challenge for the next few years."

They said this was a first step of the future development of cancer medicine. With improvement of technology to map genomes, in future each cancer patient could have a complete genome catalog to help doctors pick the right treatments for individual cases.

"As more cancer genomes are revealed by this technique, we will gain a greater understanding of how cancer is caused and develops, improving our ability to prevent, treat and cure cancer," Elizabeth Rapley of the Institute of Cancer Research said in a statement.