Order from Chaos

making sense of bowel cancer’s scrambled DNA

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Their study looked at how tumours ‘evolve’ during treatment, and showed that, genetically speaking, different parts of a patient’s kidney tumour were extremely diverse. No two regions they analysed were identical.

Although not the first study to demonstrate this diversity – known as ‘intratumoral heterogeneity’ – this paper kick-started a wider discussion of its causes and implications. Understanding how diversity develops in a tumour is important – because this is how cancers develop resistance to chemotherapy, and ultimately what makes cancer such a killer.

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They’ve been studying a phenomenon called ‘chromosomal instability’ in bowel cancer cells, where cells’ DNA becomes more and more disordered as they grow and divide, causing ever-greater genetic chaos. Patients with more unstable tumours tend to do worse - so understanding how it develops is important.

In a series of meticulous and detailed experiments, the researchers have found compelling evidence that chromosomal instability is caused by the malfunctioning of a particular (and unexpected) step in cell division, and identified three genes involved.

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http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2013/02/27/order-from-chaos-making-sense-of-bowel-cancers-scrambled-dna/