Cancer signatures reveal origins of disease
Courtesy of PathXL:
Recognized as one of the world’s leading genome centres, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institutes’ work is dedicated to engaging in exploratory projects that can influence and empower medical science globally. Researchers at the Hinxton based centre who work within the cancer genome project, use the human genome sequence and high-throughput mutation detection techniques to identify somatically acquired sequence variants/mutations. This allows the research team to identify genes which are critical to the development of cancer in humans.
Staff at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute recently studied approximately 7, 000 genomes of patients with the most common forms of cancer and discovered over 20 signatures of processes that cause DNA to mutate and the biological processes responsible for this. This is a huge breakthrough in understanding tumour development and has the potential to help treat and prevent a wide range of cancers more effectively. This also leads the way for further research to be done in understanding the complicated biological processes that leaves these mutated signatures on cancer genomes.
