Cancer 'a difficult war to win'
Cancer 'a difficult war to win'
2008-09-05Newsfeed
Downbeat scientists have compared the fight against cancer to taking on entrenched insurgents in a hard-fought "guerilla war".
Downbeat scientists have compared the fight against cancer to taking on entrenched insurgents in a hard-fought "guerilla war".
A study of the genetic blueprints for deadly brain and pancreatic cancers, published in the journals Science and Nature, found a network of previously unknown defective biological pathways in both.
The findings suggest that a conventional war on cancer is unlikely to succeed, according to US expert Professor Kenneth Kinzler, one of the researchers involved.
Prof Kinzler, from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in the US, said: "The landscape of human cancers is clearly more complex than has been previously appreciated.
"Individually, these mutations don't seem formidable. But working together, they form an enemy that will require us to develop novel strategies to combat them, and the best long-term strategy may be early detection of tumours, when the number of guerilla warriors is still small and more easily handled."
Teams looked at pancreatic cancer and the most common and dangerous form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).
Scientists analysed the sequences of more than 20,000 protein-encoding genes from 24 pancreatic and 22 brain tumours.
In each type of tumour, about a dozen regulatory pathways were found to contribute to the development and growth of the cancer.
They included processes linked to DNA damage control, cell maturation, and tumour invasion. Alterations in these pathways were found in between 67% and 100% of pancreatic tumours.
Copyright © The Press Association 2008
