Oct 8, 2009 8:12 pm US/Eastern
HealthWatch: Breakthrough In Breast Cancer Studies
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
A major medical breakthrough could help unravel the mystery of how breast cancer begins and what makes it spread.
Inside a vat of liquid nitrogen are the frozen secrets of breast cancer. Hundreds of tumor samples awaiting the right tools and techniques to unravel the mysteries how breast cancer develops and spreads. The answers lie in the genes, the DNA, of the cancer cells.
"We've never had the possibility to go in and retrieve all of the sequence and all of the mutations present in any particular cancer," said Dr. Samuel Aparicio of the British Columbia Center.
The Canadian study in this week's journal "Nature" mapped the genetic make-up of a breast cancer patient's original tumor and compared it to the same patient's tumor that spread nine years later. By identifying each cell's genetic mutation, they saw exactly how the cancer evolved.
The next step is using new technology to do the same sequencing quickly and economically for many thousands of tumors.
"Over the long term we hope that being able to decode the sequence of tumors on a routine basis will lead us to eventually being able to better predict which combinations of medicines to use when treating a cancer. We're not quite there yet but this is an important step forward," said Aparicio.
"We still subject a lot of women to treatments of uncertain benefits so anything that helps us narrow the treatment focus down is going to be a major advance," said Dr. Daniel Rayson, a medical oncologist.
So far they've sequenced the genes in one patient's tumor. Now they'll start doing more building an encyclopedia of data on breast cancer that was not possible before to look for patterns of mutations and try to understand which ones are doing the dirty work, and causing the disease to spread – information they hope will lead to improved therapies.
"We're not quite there yet, but this is an important step forward," said Aparicio.
Cancer experts say they will now be able to compare the genetics of a tumor before and after it spreads so they can figure out what allows a cancer cell to metastasize and become lethal. Then they can figure out how to keep cancer from spreading, turning it into a treatable, chronic disease.
It used to cost millions and take months or years to decode the genes in a cell. Now it costs only thousands and can be done in a few days or weeks.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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