Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Smoking / Quit Smoking Also Included In: Lung Cancer;Genetics Article Date: 17 Sep 2012 - 12:00 PDT
Current ratings for: Smokers With Lung Cancer Have Tenfold Genetic Damage
Senior author Richard K. Wilson is director of The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in the US. He says in a media statement that none of his team was surprised that the genomes of smokers with lung cancer had more mutations than the genomes of never-smokers with the disease:
"But it was surprising to see 10-fold more mutations. It does reinforce the old message - don't smoke," he adds.
Within non-small cell there are also three further classifications: adenocarcinomas (usually found in an outer area of the lung); squamous cell carcinomas (usually found in the center of the lung next to a bronchus or air tube); and large cell carcinomas (these can occur in any part of the lung and tend to grow and spread faster than the other two classes).
In their paper, the researchers describe how they carried out "whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing of tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples" from all 17 patients.
Across all 17 patients they identified just over 3,700 mutations, with an average mutation frequency more than 10-fold higher in the smokers compared to the never-smokers.
However, the researchers can't say whether these will work on these mutations in lung cancer patients, as first author Ramaswamy Govindan, an oncologist who treats patients at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University, explains:
"Whether these drugs will actually work in patients with these DNA alterations still needs to be studied."
"But papers like this open up the landscape to understand what's happening. Now we need to drill deeper and do studies to understand how these mutations cause and promote cancer, and how they can be targeted for therapy," he adds.
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