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This article from Cancer Research UK talks about the search for the causes of cancer, in particular kidney cancer, to help prevent people from developing the disease.
The research was carried out by a team of international researchers called Mutographs. Mutographs is one of the teams of international researchers funded by Cancer Grand Challenges, a funding initiative from Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US.
The research is being led by Professor Sir Mike Stratton and includes researchers in the UK, US and France. The aim of Mutographs is to identify unknown causes of cancer to help prevent people from developing the disease.
The researchers have collected samples from more than 5,000 people with bowel, kidney, oesophageal, bladder or pancreatic cancer across 5 continents. These people are from countries with either high or low levels of these cancers. The reasons for the sometimes huge differences in cancer incidence between countries are currently unknown, and Mutographs is looking into this.
The team hope to find the DNA changes or sequences (mutations/signatures) that are more common in countries with a high incidence of cancer, and less common in those countries with low incidence. They can then try to link the mutations/signatures with what might be causing them and determine if those causes can be avoided in the future to prevent more cancers.
New research from the team is published today in Nature.
This research has uncovered signatures like SBS40b in kidney cancer tumours, but has not discovered the cause of these signatures yet. But this is just the beginning. Now the researchers have identified the signatures, they can work backwards to find the cause.
Read the full article in Cancer Research UK Cancer News here