When I Was Young

From My Paper, My Lifestyle, MOMENT
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

CANCER experts who probed every gene in tumours from two of the hardest-to-treat cancers found that cancer is much more complicated than anyone thought – and say they found why a cure is unlikely after a tumour has spread.

They also discovered a potential new way to treat a common and fatal form of brain cancer.

They also opened the door to finding cancer before it has spread when it can still be cured surgically, they reported last Thursday in the journal Science.

“Cancer is very complex – more complex than we had believed. It is not going to be easy to develop therapies,” said Dr Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“If you have 100 patients, you have 100 different diseases.”

The findings suggest that popular new targeted therapies may not work broadly, because they affect only one mutated gene, while cancer is caused by dozens.

A better approach would be to find the pathways – networks of genes – that control a tumour’s uncontrolled growth and spread.

Dr Vogelstein said the findings suggest that pharmaceutical companies should change their approach to developing new cancer drugs.

“It is extremely unlikely that drugs which target a single gene will be active against a major fraction of solid tumours,” said Dr Vogelstein.

“Instead of screening for drugs against single proteins, our work suggests that it may be more productive to screen for drugs that act against core pathways.”

– REUTERS