The method was created by a team from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute , the German Cancer Research Center , the Science for Life Laboratory in Sweden, and collaborators. It could be used to help answer some of the big questions in cancer, such as why some cancer cells spread, how treatment resistance is formed, and why some therapies fail.
The mutations that occur will be influenced by what is happening around the cancer, the cells that it is surrounded with, and the individual's immune system. Therefore, being able to study the environment that a cancer cell is in, what mutations arise, and which cancer cells spread around the body gives a complete view of tumor evolution.
"While it has been previously possible to trace the lineage of cancer tumor cells in an experimental setup, this is the first time that multiple lineages were traced in human tissues, giving a complete overview ofdevelopment in the body. Insights generated by our system were impossible to get before, especially at this scale."
Professor Mats Nilsson, co-senior author from the Science for Life Laboratory at Stockholm University, said,"Cancer is caused by genetic mutations in a cell and this research was the first time that we were able to use DNA base specific probes to target dozens of these mutations in a set of cancer cell clones."
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