Untangling the development of breast cancer: Evolution of 21 breast cancers
Thursday, May 17, 2012 - 15:30
in Health & Medicine
The team created a catalogue of all the mutations in the genomes of the 21 breast cancer genomes. They identified entirely new mutational processes that drive breast cancer development, including one remarkable process defined by localized regions of hypermutation found in most of the breast cancers. This phenomenon has never been seen before. They also found that, once many mutations have accumulated in a cell, the cell then diverges into different subgroups, one of which is destined to become the aggressive, dominant, breast cancer tumor. These findings have implications for our understanding of how breast cancers develop over the decades before diagnosis in adults.