Tumor Genome Sheds Light on Lung Cancer
Reported November 06, 2007
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Scientists are one step closer to understanding the most common type of lung cancer – lung adenocarcinoma, which is also the most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide.
The new report is the first one from the Tumor Sequencing Project which is made up of three genome centers and five cancer centers in the United States. It shows a comprehensive view of the altered genetic background of lung adenocarcinomas.
This view of the lung cancer genome is unprecedented, both in its breadth and depth, senior author Dr. Matthew Meyerson, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, was quoted as saying. It lays an essential foundation, and has already pinpointed an important gene that controls the growth of lung cells. This information offers crucial inroads to the biology of lung cancer and will help shape new strategies for cancer diagnosis and therapy.
When researchers analyzed genetic tumors from lung cancer patients they found 57 frequent genomic changes 15 of them linked to genes known to be involved in lung cancer. The rest still need to be discovered.
The study shows the gene NKX2-1 is essential in the development of cells that line the alveoli of the lungs. Mice that dont have that gene die at birth because they cannot breathe. But because it is a proto-oncogene, it can mutate into a gene that promotes the development of cancer.
More than one million people die of lung cancer every year across the world. 150,000 die of the disease each year in the United States.
SOURCE: Nature published online Nov. 4, 2007
