Cancer's path depends on mutation order

摘要

It is well known that cancers can develop from mutations in DNA -but now we've seen for the first time that a person's fate may depend on the order in which they occur. In every cancer, there are hundreds of mutations, but some have more of an effect on the disease than others. It has now been shown that a cancer's path changes depending on which of these "driver mutations" comes first. This affects how the cancer develops, and which treatments are likely to work best. This finding comes from an analysis of blood samples from 246 people with blood disorders called myeloproliferative neoplasms, which develop into leukaemia in about 5 to 10 per cent of cases. Researchers had access to samples from both early and later stages of the disease, enabling them to see the order in which key mutations appeared in affected blood cells.