Investor Updates
Australian scientists lead international team in cancer finding
6 November 2012
Australian scientists from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research and The University of Queensland have led an international team of over 100 researchers in unmasking the secrets of pancreatic cancer.
Results of this large-scale study – defining the complexity of underlying mutations responsible for this deadly cancer – have just been published in the prestigious journal, Nature.
The fourth-leading cause of cancer death, pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers. There has been no substantial improvement in the survival rate for forty years.
During the research, the Australian-led team sequenced the genomes of more than a hundred pancreatic tumours and compared these to normal tissue to determine the genetic changes that lead to this cancer.
Professor Sean Grimmond from The University of Queensland said that the team had found over 2,000 mutated genes, ranging from one which mutated in about 90 per cent of samples to hundreds which were only present in one or two per cent of the tumours.
“So while the tumours may look very similar under the microscope, genetic analysis reveals as many variations in each tumour as there are patients,” Professor Grimmond said.
“This demonstrates that so-called ‘pancreatic cancer’ is not one disease, but many, and suggests that people who seemingly have the same cancer might need to be treated differently,” he added.
Professor Andrew Biankin from the Garvan Institute said that such individual genetic diagnoses and treatments represent the future of health care.
The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia gave $27.5 million in funding towards this project – its largest-ever single grant.
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