An innovative method allows scientists new insight into this condition

Nov 20, 2013 13:24 GMT  ·  By

A collaboration of researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), in London, and Wellcome Trust Sanger announces the development of a new method of obtaining genetic fingerprints from individual cancer cell. This work could have significant implications for understanding the genetic diversity of cancer, one of the most widely-spread diseases in the world today.

This diversity is one of the main reasons why treating cancer is such a complex process, and why treatments that may be functional for some tumors do nothing to destroy others. But the new study shows promise in discovering the founding mutations that allow cancer to endure in the human body.

Such mutations are what allow each type of tumor to evolve and grow. Scientists with the research group plan to use the data they will collect via this genetic fingerprinting technique to create family trees for each particular type of cancer.

In turn, this will provide geneticists with new avenues of research, potentially enabling them to develop new, targeted therapies for various forms of cancer, including highly-aggressive ones such as glioblastoma (a type of brain cancer), pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer, Science Daily reports.

The recent study was conducted on genetic material harvested from three patients diagnosed with leukemia. Investigators used advanced DNA sequencing methods to detect common mutations in all the thousands of cancer cells they studied.

After this panel of mutations was identified, the team moved on to analyzing individual tumor cells for signs of the mutations, and then create a genetic fingerprint map for each of them. This ultimately allowed them to reconstruct the family tree for each such mutation, something that has never been done before.

What the group found was that each form of leukemia had its own series of underlying mutations that enabled the blood cancer to grow and become resistant to the actions of the immune system. Details of the work appear in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Genome Research.

One way in which these findings may be put to good use is the creation of genetic marker tests that will be able to identify dangerous mutations long before cancer takes a hold in the body, thus allowing doctors the option of a preemptive strike against the disease.

The research was conducted with funds obtained from Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, the Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund, ICR, and the Wellcome Trust.