From an investigation of more than 2,000 tumors covering 12 types of human cancer, scientists have identified 27 new genes that could stop the tumors in its tracks. Researchers said that the discovery of these genes could be useful to find out the treatments for cancer.
Cancer remains as one of the biggest health burden worldwide. There are around 14.1 million new cases of cancers diagnosed across the globe in 2012.
Cancer occurs when abnormal cells divide in an uncontrolled manner, forms tumors. Some cancers may eventually spread into other tissues. Generally human cells contain two copies of tumor suppressor genes, which work to prevent tumor formation by slowing down cell division and growth. Then the malfunctioning of these two tumor suppressor genes forms cancer. And it is very difficult for researchers to find out these two tumors suppressor genes because the tumor often contains a mixture of both healthy and cancerous cells in various proportions.
But, now the researchers have created a statistical model, which utilizes single nucleotide polymorphism analysis, which could help to overcome such problems. So far, it has helped them to identify an array of new tumor suppressor genes. In this present study the researchers applied their statistical model to find out the number of tumor suppressor genes in the cells of 2,218 tumors across 12 types of cancers such as breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, and brain cancers. According to researchers, their research results may lead to personalized cancer, a therapy that is the treatments are shaped to individual patients based on the genetic structure of their cancerous cells. And this model is not only useful to study team to calculate the proportions of healthy and cancerous cells in each tumor, also make it easier to determine the presence of tumor suppressor genes in the cells, and also revealed the distinct “DNA footprint” of tumor suppressor genes. This allowed them to differentiate these genes from non-harmful gene mutations. As a result, the researchers identified a total of 96 gene deletions among the tumors by using computational tool, which includes 43 tumor suppressor genes, of which 27 new ones.