An astounding variety of genetic abnormalities can cause healthy cells to turn cancerous. Few of these are shared among cancers of the same tissue, and fewer still are shared among cancers of different tissues. Nevertheless, scientists searching for such common genetic needles in an array of cancer haystacks document their findings in two papers published today (September 26, 2013) in Nature Genetics.1,2
“For the first time we have been able to analyze, across the board, large numbers of tumor samples . . . and also systematically look across different tumor types,” said Chris Sander, chair of the computational biology program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and senior author on one of the new papers. The aim, he said, was to learn about principles of cancer biology that might not have been obvious from previous studies examining one tumor type in isolation.
The work of Sander and ...
