The complete history of cancer disease

Cancer occurs not just happen. There is a long-term accumulation of errors in the DNA is required. British scientists have that disease history for two types of cancer mapped.

Just a bit of a substantial lifting a cigarette taken? Then your DNA optater another big deal. For every fifteen cigarettes you smoke, sneaking a genetic error in your genome. How bad can that be? Not really. Your body is in fact perfectly capable of making mistakes in DNA repair. Since the cell has been designed for all kinds of repair services.

But go long enough to smoke and repair services can no longer keep up. A more permanent errors creep into your DNA, with the emergence of a cancer hazard. But do not just cancer arises. It has a full medical history.

Cancer Genome

British cancer researchers at the prestigious Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have now two types of cancer that history mapped: lung cancer and melanoma, the most malignant form of skin cancer. The researchers have compiled a cancer genome with all DNA mistakes in the course of time have slipped into the genome. This performance is good for two articles in Nature this week.

Why lung cancer and melanoma? Because of these two types of cancer known what the main cause. That's smoking for lung cancer and UV light for melanoma. The incompetent researchers compared cells from a patient with lung cancer and normal cells from lung and skin. They let it loose on advanced techniques and repeated the tests sixty to seventy times to make sure that they made no mistakes.

Thus the British discovered that someone with lung cancer some 23,000 DNA errors. A melanoma patient has even more than 30,000. Moreover, the researchers identify exactly what errors were the result of smoking or UV light and other causes what errors had.

Final push

Imagine that scientists discover which DNA fatal errors exactly one cell and that cell that push into the abyss and so this is a cancer. Then there are specific medications.

According to the director of the institute Mark Walport is the future of cancer treatment. On a tailor-made treatment. An expensive joke, because the equipment is expensive, tests are time consuming and often need to be repeated, but nevertheless hopeful.

Anyone who does not want to wait, what can the cancer story also raises concerns in their own hands: stop smoking. After fifteen years all the cancer cells disappeared. Probably because the body cleans itself of unhealthy cells and replaces by new cells provided by stem cells in the lung.