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This is an excerpt from a long and interesting article in today's, "The New York Times".
Doctors are now coming to, "a new understanding of cancer as a genetic disease. But if cancer is a genetic disease, it is like no other in medicine.
With cancer, a person may inherit a predisposition that helps set the process off, but it can take decades - even a lifetime - to accumulate the additional mutations needed to establish a tumor. That is why, scientists say, cancer usually strikes older people and requires an element of bad luck.
'You have to get mutations in the wrong place at the wrong time,' Dr. Druker says.
Other genetic diseases may involve one or two genetic changes. In cancer, scores of genes are mutated or duplicated and huge chunks of genetic material are rearranged. With cancer cells, said Dr. William Hahn, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, 'it looks like someone has thrown a bomb in the nucleus.'
In other genetic diseases, gene alterations disable cells. In cancer, genetic changes give cells a sort of superpower.
At first, as scientists grew to appreciate the complexity of cancer genetics, they despaired. 'If there are 100 genetic abnormalities, that's 100 things you need to fix to cure cancer,' said Dr. Todd Golub, the director of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., and an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. 'That's a horrifying thought.'
Making matters more complicated, scientists discovered that the genetic changes in one patient's tumor were different from those in another patient with the same type of cancer. That led to new questioning. Was every patient going to be a unique case? Would researchers need to discover new drugs for every single patient?
'People said, "It's hopelessly intractable and too complicated a problem to ever figure out," ' Dr. Golub recalled.
But to their own amazement, scientists are now finding that untangling the genetics of cancer is not impossible. In fact, they say, what looked like an impenetrable shield protecting cancer cells turns out to be flimsy. And those seemingly impervious cancer cells, Dr. Golub said, 'are very much poised to die.'
The story of genes and cancer, like most in science, involves many discoveries over many years. But in a sense, it has its roots in the 1980's, with a bold decision by Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University to piece together the molecular pathways that lead to cancer.
It was a time when the problem looked utterly complicated. Scientists thought that cancer cells were so abnormal that they were, as Dr. Vogelstein put it, 'a total black box.'"
Please see the article to read about how research progressed from then and how hopeful the outlook is becoming!
Slowly, Cancer Genes Tender Their Secrets
Doctors are now coming to, "a new understanding of cancer as a genetic disease. But if cancer is a genetic disease, it is like no other in medicine.
With cancer, a person may inherit a predisposition that helps set the process off, but it can take decades - even a lifetime - to accumulate the additional mutations needed to establish a tumor. That is why, scientists say, cancer usually strikes older people and requires an element of bad luck.
'You have to get mutations in the wrong place at the wrong time,' Dr. Druker says.
Other genetic diseases may involve one or two genetic changes. In cancer, scores of genes are mutated or duplicated and huge chunks of genetic material are rearranged. With cancer cells, said Dr. William Hahn, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, 'it looks like someone has thrown a bomb in the nucleus.'
In other genetic diseases, gene alterations disable cells. In cancer, genetic changes give cells a sort of superpower.
At first, as scientists grew to appreciate the complexity of cancer genetics, they despaired. 'If there are 100 genetic abnormalities, that's 100 things you need to fix to cure cancer,' said Dr. Todd Golub, the director of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., and an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. 'That's a horrifying thought.'
Making matters more complicated, scientists discovered that the genetic changes in one patient's tumor were different from those in another patient with the same type of cancer. That led to new questioning. Was every patient going to be a unique case? Would researchers need to discover new drugs for every single patient?
'People said, "It's hopelessly intractable and too complicated a problem to ever figure out," ' Dr. Golub recalled.
But to their own amazement, scientists are now finding that untangling the genetics of cancer is not impossible. In fact, they say, what looked like an impenetrable shield protecting cancer cells turns out to be flimsy. And those seemingly impervious cancer cells, Dr. Golub said, 'are very much poised to die.'
The story of genes and cancer, like most in science, involves many discoveries over many years. But in a sense, it has its roots in the 1980's, with a bold decision by Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University to piece together the molecular pathways that lead to cancer.
It was a time when the problem looked utterly complicated. Scientists thought that cancer cells were so abnormal that they were, as Dr. Vogelstein put it, 'a total black box.'"
Please see the article to read about how research progressed from then and how hopeful the outlook is becoming!
Slowly, Cancer Genes Tender Their Secrets
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