The latest map of all the genes involved in a set of tumor cells exposes which mutations drive cancer and how to possibly treat them.
The Human Genome Project provided the first glimpse of the power of genetic maps, and ever since, sequencing the DNA code of not just people but also tissues like tumors has become an invaluable tool in medicine. Laying out the biological code that instructs a fertilized egg to mature into the cells, tissues, organs and body systems that define a human being has led to important discoveries about how we get sick when those directions go awry.
And applying that same technique to cancer cells, experts are exposing some of the critical factors that drive cells to divide out of control to form tumors. In the latest advance, researchers at the National Cancer Institute have sequenced all of the genes in a cancer-cell database that was designed to test promising new drug compounds. With the most complete map of tumor aberrations now available, they can determine whether some of the failed drug candidates discarded over the years — there are thousands of them — may actually be useful in treating certain cancers.
(MORE: Decoding Cancer: Scientists Release 520 Tumor Genomes From Pediatric Patients)
“There is an unlimited amount of matching anyone could do,” says Dr. Yves Pommier, chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute and lead investigator of the study, which was published in the journal Cancer Research. “As we integrate this data into the current process of molecular medicine, I think more links [to new drugs] will be made.”
Sequencing the DNA of tumors, and exposing their mutations, is a potent technique for understanding what fuels tumors to develop in the first place, as well as what keeps them going. But until recently, the cost and technology required to sequence all 20,000 or so genes in each of these cancer cells weren’t feasible. The process, says Pommier, “is easy to say, much harder to do,” and it took his team more than two and a half years to complete the maps for the 60 tumor-cell lines, representing nine different cancers, from breast, prostate, brain, lung, colon and kidney tumors. Mapping each of the genes from these cell lines tallied up 6 billion data points that Pommier’s team sequenced, aligned, curated and compared with normal cell genomes in order to come up with the most exhaustive dossier of all the mutations in a specific cancer-cell type to date.
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