Genomic discoveries provide new leads for Cancer Prevention and Therapy

Modern high-throughput technologies provide extensive molecular information on tumors, which is analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of genetic factors that trigger and sustain cancer growth. This ever-growing knowledge advances patient care in many different ways, from guiding day-to-day treatment decisions for individual patients to steering the direction of new drug development.
Two recent studies brought intriguing new insights, which may have implications for cancer prevention and therapy in the future.
In the first study, researchers were able to link known cancer triggers, such as tobacco and sun tanning, to specific sets of genetic changes or mutational signatures in tumor tissue.
In another study, similar mutational signatures were sometimes found in entirely different types of cancer. This finding suggests that treatment for a cancer is more dependent on mutations in a tumor than on the organ in which the cancer arises.This may mean that patients with bladder cancer who have a specific mutational signature that is found in lung cancer should be treated more like patients with lung cancer, rather than like other patients with bladder cancer. This potentially has broad applications for the approach to cancer therapy, but more research is needed to confirm this possibility.