Perhaps more than any other, cancer is seen as a disease of genes gone wrong. So, as genetic-sequencing technology has become cheaper and faster, cancer scientists are using it to check which changes to genes cause tumours to spread. The latest insights from one group, the international Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG), are revealed this week in Nature.
In an analysis of the full genomes of 2,658 samples of 38 types of tumour taken from the bladder to the brain, the researchers give a blow-by-blow account of how a series of genetic mutations can turn normal cells into runaway clones. It provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of where to find this damaging disruption to DNA and, by unpicking the genetics of what makes cancer tick, just how hard it will be to tame.
For each of the cancer samples, the team produced a read-out of the tumour genome—the 3bn or so individual DNA letters—and compared it with the genome sequences of healthy cells taken from the same patients. In this way they could look for the genetic signatures of the cancer cells, where specific mutations had warped the genetic information.
