More Than a Thousand Scientists Have Built the Most Detailed Picture of Cancer Ever (bbc.com) 31
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: More than a thousand scientists have built the most detailed picture of cancer ever in a landmark study. They said cancer was like a 100,000-piece jigsaw, and that until today, 99% of the pieces were missing. Their studies, published in the journal Nature, provide an almost complete picture of all cancers. They could allow treatment to be tailored to each patient's unique tumor, or develop ways of finding cancer earlier. The Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium analyzed the whole genetic code of 2,658 cancers.
The project found people's cancers contain, on average, between four and five fundamental mutations that drive a cancer's growth. These are potential weak-spots that can be exploited with treatments that attack these "driver mutations." However, 5% of cancers appear to have no driver mutations at all, showing there is still more work to do. Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found. "We've developed the first timelines of genetic mutations across the spectrum of cancer types," said Dr Peter Van Loo from the Francis Crick Institute. He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier." Further reading: Science Magazine
The project found people's cancers contain, on average, between four and five fundamental mutations that drive a cancer's growth. These are potential weak-spots that can be exploited with treatments that attack these "driver mutations." However, 5% of cancers appear to have no driver mutations at all, showing there is still more work to do. Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found. "We've developed the first timelines of genetic mutations across the spectrum of cancer types," said Dr Peter Van Loo from the Francis Crick Institute. He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier." Further reading: Science Magazine
Picture = 1000 words, 1 picture/1000 scientists (Score:2)
So, they each put in a single word?
Windmills? That's what they want you to think (Score:2)
I'm not saying it was aliens, but...
Gotta cite everything (Score:3)
Re:Gotta cite everything (Score:4, Informative)
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"We used cloud computing26,27 to distribute alignment and variant calling across 13 data centres on 3 continents (Supplementary Table 3). Core pipelines were packaged into Docker containers28 as reproducible, stand-alone packages, which we have made available for download. Data repositories for raw and derived datasets, together with portals for data visualization and exploration, have also been created (Box 1 and Supplementary Table 4)."
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Not sure why you think citing references there is "lol". Have you read scientific papers about lcomputation projects (ie gene sequencing like in this one) before?
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It's LOL random, they also used python and Linux, but they didn't cite those.
Such a weird existential hill to pick.
Re: Gotta cite everything (Score:2)
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"Not sure why you think citing references there is "lol". Have you read scientific papers about lcomputation projects (ie gene sequencing like in this one) before?"
He was confused.
"News for nerds, stuff that matters" has become so rare here, that people think it's a mythical beast when they finally encounter it.
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Indeed. The thread following the article about MS Search being down was pitiful. "How do you find the remote desktop client if Search isn't working?"
How far we've fallen..
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Anything to make yourself look smart, I guess.
Sick (Score:3)
Cancer is much nastier than you thought [wnycstudios.org].
Cancer: Cells that don't know when to stop growing (Score:1)
The difficulty here (Score:3)
This team used some algorithms to help identify mutations that were more likely to cause cancer than others, but it failed to identify some (previously known) cancerous mutations, and as the summary mentions, for some of the cancers they couldn't find what a potential cause. Of course our modern hypothesis is that cancer is a disease of the genome, so there must be some kind of driver there.
This next step, once you find a genomic mutation that causes cancer, is to try to find a medicine that attacks that mutation. If you are lucky, there is already a medicine on the market that will work (although that medicine was approved for another purpose, if we know it attacks a particular cellular pathway, then it can be repurposed).
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Even without the medical intervention, they note that a lot of these mutations show up years, sometimes decades before the cancer triggers and starts doing its pacman thing.
Theres a huge potential there for catching these bastards early and doing something about it before it turns into something far more drastic
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Even without the medical intervention, they note that a lot of these mutations show up years, sometimes decades before the cancer triggers and starts doing its pacman thing.
Worth mentioning it's not usually a single mutation that causes problems, it's a few. The body has natural regulators that will push things back, but when multiple mutations happen, they can get overwhelmed.
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The amount of people dying from infectious diseases doesn't even hit the top 7 in terms of causes of death in the US.
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Yep, that pesky common cold, a "quickly spreading virus..." is far more dangerous than cancer.
You read it here first on Slashdot!!
It took a 1000+ scientists to draw Trump's face? (Score:1)
Too bad... (Score:3)
Oh well.
Could this lead to a vaccine against cancer? (Score:2)
Suppose you take all the "driver" DNA sequences, and produce RNA interference [wikipedia.org] treatments for all of them. Could that make a vaccine against 95% of cancer?
They'd probably have to skip some, whether due to the sequences not being transcribed to RNA or the RNAi interfering with other genes. Even so, a vaccine preventing a significant percentage of cancers would be a huge development!