At the European Cancer Congress in Vienna, researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge (Great Britain) announced that they had discovered a genetic clue that could track breast cancer who are at risk of reoffending.
In one in five people with breast cancer, the disease will recur, either in the same place as the original tumor or in another part of the body. Dr Lucy Yates, an oncologist at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, and her team analyzed tumor data from more than 1,000 patients, including 161 people with recurrence.
By comparing primary and secondary tumors, the researchers found notable genetic differences as well as genetic mutations specific to secondary cancers.
According to the researchers, doctors may in the future be able to use these new clues to identify patients at high risk of recurrence in order to choose the best treatment.
“Further work will be needed to validate these results on larger databases but we hope that in the future it will be possible to identify the cancer-specific genes of each individual to select a personalized therapy” said the Dr Yates at the congress.
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