April 20, 2012

It might be a bit more complicated than that

By

The Herald has a very good story about a breast-cancer genomics project, where researchers looked at mutations in 2000 stored breast-cancer tumour samples, and used these to pigeonhole the tumours into 10 groups.  The hope is that this information can be used, eventually, to work out which tumours respond to which treatments, resulting in more effective treatment with fewer side-effects.

The researchers are properly careful about the implications

“I want to be very cautious here. This is a very important first step, and now what follows is to validate its clinical use,” Caldas said.

 In particular, there have been at least two papers recently that perform whole-genome sequencing on multiple samples from the same tumour (via “In the Pipeline”).  These researchers found surprising levels of heterogeneity within single tumours — different regions appeared to have developed different sequences of mutations more-or-less independently. Cancer seems to get more complicated whenever we look closer.
avatar

Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »