Harvard research targets cancer drivers
Discoveries in cancer research have included everything from genes that can transform healthy cells into tumor cells to advances related to tumor immunology, but those breakthroughs have often led to new complexities, leaving researchers with additional questions. Now, the limits of those complexities may be coming into view. Evidence uncovered by a team of researchers that included Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and of biology, suggests that, within individual patients, the majority of driver mutations — genetic mutations that help create or sustain cancerous cells — are shared by both the primary tumor and metastases. The study was described in a paper published last month in Science. That finding is critical because it creates hope for targeted combination therapy against metastatic cancer, said Nowak, also the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Rather than trying to combat the effects of dozens of different genes, clinicians might only have to design treatments...