Cancer therapies are becoming more and more specific, which is why knowing in detail the genomic background of each tumor is essential to make more precise diagnoses and personalized treatmentssomething that until now was very difficult in the most aggressive cancers.
Now, an international team of researchers led by the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, has developed a method to decipher the genetic ‘chaos’ of the deadliest cancers and use that information to treat them in a much more effective way.
The method, described today in an article published in the journal ‘Nature’, helps detect ‘fingerprints’ in the genome of tumors that allow us to know which genetic mutations have caused the cancer, something that will help identify the weak points of the tumor to whom each treatment should be directed.
The research, co-directed by Geoff Macintyre, from the CNIO, and Florian Markowetz, from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (United Kingdom), has been carried out together with Bárbara Hernando, also from the CNIO, and other scientists from British, Canadian, Belgian and German centers .
The work deciphers the so-called ‘chromosomal instability’, one of the hallmarks of the most aggressive cancers.
Under normal conditions, the cells of the body, when dividing, make sure that the daughter cells have the correct number of chromosomes, but cancer cells, on the contrary, usually have loss or gain of chromosome fragments or whole chromosomes, a ‘genetic chaos’ that especially occurs in the most serious cancers. In fact, the greater the genomic instability of the tumor, the more advanced the cancer tends to be, and the worse the prognosis and resistance to therapies.
Varied causes
This biological phenomenon is very complex because it has varied causes and multiple consequences and for this reason, until now, when a tumor is discovered, the diagnosis only indicates whether the cancer is of high or low chromosomal instability, without analyzing the extent or the causes of that instability. And that is precisely what this work has changed: it allows for an in-depth understanding of each tumour, characterizing the causes, diversity and extent of chromosomal instability in the most severe cases, which will enable both diagnosis and treatment to be much more accurate.
Until now, medicine personalized or precision only benefited 5 percent of patientsbecause in tumors with high chromosomal instability, they do not have a single defective gene but many, so it was not possible to use this type of medicine effectively.
But with the new method, “we can decode and interpret the DNA of these complex tumors and thus be able to select the most optimal treatment for each patient,” says Bárbara Hernando. “We calculate that Up to 80% of cancer patients may benefit of this discovery, especially those that have cancers with a higher mortality rate such as ovarian, pancreas, lung or esophagus”, the researcher points out.
“Our biomarkers can predict the efficacy that therapies are going to have on a specific tumor. To obtain these patterns of the different genomic chaos, we have analyzed the chromosomal instability of 7,880 samples of tumors from 33 different types of cancer”, emphasizes Macyntire.
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The group that has carried out this research has launched a ‘spin off’ company called Tailor Bio, based in the United Kingdom and which has licensed a patent on this method.
The intention of the researchers with these steps is that this advance cbegin to be used in clinical practice as soon as possible.