Woman's cancer genome decoded
— -- Talk about personalized medicine: For the first time, scientists have mapped all the genes in a single person's cancer, allowing them to uncover eight new genes that could lead to better ways to treat the disease.
Researchers used malignant blood cells from a 50-something woman who died of acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of blood-forming cells in the bone marrow, according to a paper in today's Nature. Doctors mapped all the genes in her tumor cells, the compared them — side by side — with the genes in a normal cell from her skin.
That allowed them to see exactly how the DNA of cancer differs from healthy DNA, says author Timothy Ley, a professor of medicine and genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Ley and his colleagues found just 10 key genetic changes in the woman's leukemia. Eight were new genes never before linked to this kind of cancer.
Ley says his findings are a reminder of cancer's daunting complexity.
He examined tumor samples from 187 other patients with the same type of leukemia, hoping to find many genes in common — something that could make it easier to design one drug that would work for everyone. But none of the other patients had the same eight new mutations found in the woman's tumor.
That suggests that even cancers that look alike may actually be caused by completely different genetic changes, Ley says.
"There's a lot to learn," Ley says. "We're just getting started."
It's possible, Ley says, that doctors may find that there are dozens of genes that contribute to this type of leukemia. He compares the pathways to cancer development like the roads that lead to a city. Although these roads may follow different paths, they all converge at once place. In the future, doctors will try to design drugs that block the parts of these pathways that cells have in common, much as police set up roadblocks on commonly used highways.
Ley and colleagues are already mapping another patient's "cancer genome," as the collection of genes is called, and hopes to quickly map 10 more.
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