Scientists in U.S. for the first time have decoded the entire genome of a patient suffering from white blood cell cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided its progression, according to media reports Thursday.
They compared the tumor tissue of a woman who died of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) to her normal tissue, and sequenced 10 mutated genes in the cancerous tissue apparently involved in triggering the disease.
Previous researches had linked two of them to AML, but the rest never before had been implicated.
"The other eight were all things that caught us off guard. They're all new. And they are all in genes that we didn't really have on our radar for this particular kind of cancer. In retrospect, they all make sense," Dr. Timothy Ley said.
Three of them normally act to suppress tumor growth, four are involved in promoting cell growth and the final one may affect how drugs enter a cell, the researchers said.
"This is the first human cancer genome that's been sequenced. In the past, we've always looked at parts of the genome for mutations. But this is the first time that we've been able to look at everything," Ley said.
It will take more research to determine exactly what the mutations did. Researchers would also like to know the order in which they occurred, and whether there was one that finally tipped the balance towards cancer.
"When this patient came to the cancer center and had a bone marrow biopsy, she already had 10 mutations," said Richard K. Wilson, director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center and the senior author of the study. "You’d love to know, if you had taken a bone marrow sample a year before, what would you have seen?"
Source: Xinhua\agencies
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article