More than 200 researchers investigating colon cancer tumors have found genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to powerful new treatments.
The hope is that drugs designed to strike these weak spots will eventually stop a cancer that is now almost inevitably fatal once it has spread.
Scientists increasingly see cancer as a genetic disease defined not so much by where it starts -- colon, liver, brain, breast -- but by genetic aberrations that are its Achilles' heel. And with an understanding of which genetic changes make a cancer grow and thrive, they say they can figure out how best to mount an attack.
They caution, however, that most of the drugs needed to target the colon cancer mutations have yet to be developed.
The colon cancer study, published Wednesday, July 18, in Nature, is the first part of a sweeping effort that is expected to produce a flood of discoveries for a wide range of cancers.
"There are so many different ways that you can attack this tumor type," said Raju Kucherlapati, the principal investigator for the colon cancer project and a professor of genetics and of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "We have an opportunity to completely change the landscape."
Researchers caution that although much is known about the genetic changes that occur in colon cancer, treatment has not caught up.
Researchers have studied colon cancer before and have identified mutations that seemed critical, but their work lacked the scope of the new project,
Markowitz, like nearly every other leading scientist in colon cancer genomics, is an author of the new study.
About 150,000 Americans receive a diagnosis of colon or rectal cancer each year, and about 50,000 die annually from the disease.
Excerpt from:
Gene study raises hopes for colon cancer drugs