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DNA Cancer Codes Cracked By International Effort
Enigma23 writes "As reported on news.com.au, scientists from the International Cancer Genome Consortium of 12 institutes around the world will today release the first DNA profiles of some of the most prevalent types of tumors. While the story asserts that 'A new era of cancer treatment has dawned,' I'm a bit more skeptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are still very much in their infancy at the current time."
I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) in the fall of 1980, it doesn't have stages like tumor cancers, but at the time I had a 5% chance to make it 3 years. I was clean after 3 months, it relapsed in the fall of 1982, 5% chance to make it 5 years.
Spring of 1991 I was diagnosed early with Stage 0 (Carcinoma in Situ) Testicular Cancer on both sides, surgery and some chemo.
Fall of 2006 I was diagnosed with a non-cancerous tumor in my neck, that left a nice scar.
I'm the only one in my NIH tracking group of ALL from back then to be alive.
Doctors freak me out, IVs of anytime scare the hell out of me, my fear are lumps from a lymph node.
I've been following this for awhile. Looks like I get to update my "hit list" of gene targets to investigate. And that's what this will ultimately be...a list of interesting genes to look at for further investigation. No cures right away, it will take time to absorb this data into the collective intelligence of the medical research community and years to turn it into new treatments.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
Well, that's not entirely true. There's also some weird stuff going on with methylation that still needs to be cracked. That's a part of the "code" if there were to be one. Also, you could say there's a histone code, with it's own methylation. I'm sure there's other mysteries in there as well.
But, as the parent says, sequencing is sequencing --- not code cracking.
Also, can I make a plea to the world that we stop saying scientists "map" a genome when they really sequenced it. Mapping is a completely different thing. They may have done some mapping when they sequenced it, but likely you really mean "sequenced" when you say "mapped". You can't throw these jargon terms around like they're synonyms, because they aren't.
And I'm not nit-picking here (nor is the parent poster). To put it in terms here that everybody can understand, it's like when my wife refers to the tower case of my PC as the "hard drive" of the computer.
Also on the issue of sequencing cancer "genomes" I think we'll find it to be a big a waste of money, as the HapMap project was, in a couple years. Maybe they'll find a few drug targets, but I predict the more cancer "genomes" that are sequenced, the more we'll find that anything is possible in cancers. What we really need to find is the driver genes that start the cellular changes leading to cancer, and lead to progression of the cancer. I'm not sure sequencing a genome that's a total mess because it's *already* a cancer cell is going to make it immediately apparent what those driver changes were. Not doubting it can be done, but it is a big effort, and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it. I think more likely you will end up with a lot of sequence data that's really difficult for most people to interpret, and contributes not that much to cancer biology. Good to know what the deal is with the cell lines they've been using all these years as models, but beyond that, who knows. (Heck, maybe I'm wrong and we'll find a bunch of previously unknown viral sequence integrated in the genomes.)
Now, I'm not trashing personalized medicine, where you sequence a patient's tumor line, and then use that to determine a treatment tuned to the cancer cell line they have. I think that's exactly how things need to go. But I am trashing this idea of creating a catalog of *all* cancer "genomes" (for the reason I mentioned above) as the goal of a "genome project". Try sequencing some new and useful genomes instead.
Overall, I don't like "gold-rush" biology, and there seems the be a lot of that going on. Be the first one in, and leave a big mess of data for the next guy to deal with.