Cancers are more complicated than anyone thought

[Guest guest]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cancer experts who probed every gene in tumors 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 so unlikely after a tumor has

spread. But they also discovered a potential new way to treat a common and fatal

form of brain cancer, and opened the door to finding cancer before it has

spread, when it can still be cured surgically, they reported on 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 s Hopkins

University in Baltimore and the Medical Institute. " If you have

100 patients, you have 100 different diseases. " The findings suggest that

popular new targeted therapies such as Novartis's Gleevec 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 tumor's uncontrolled growth and spread, they told reporters in a

telephone briefing. The international team sequenced the more than 20,000 genes

in cells from 24 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer and from 22 patients

with glioblastoma multiforme.

The typical pancreatic tumor had 63 genetic mutations, while the average brain

tumor had 60, they found. The good news is they found just 12 pathways that were

abnormal in most of the tumors. Some were in expected areas, such as the

regulation of programmed cell suicide, or apoptosis, the process by which

abnormal cells self-destruct.

Blessings,

Lottie