A recent study – entitled TRACERx – has provided the most comprehensive analysis to date of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread.
The project involved collecting genomic and clinical data from over 400 people with lung cancer (the third most common cancer in the UK) from the time of their diagnosis and throughout their treatment. The 9 year research involved 250 researchers across 19 centres across the UK and cost in the region of £14 million.
Researchers hope that the research could eventually help doctors predict how tumours will spread and progress so that treatment can be appropriately tailored. However, the findings – which scientists believe will apply to all forms of cancer – also shows just how difficult it will be to discover a universal cure with scientists identifying an “almost infinite” ability for tumours to evolve, spread and resist treatment.
Dr David Crosby, the head of prevention and early detection at Cancer Research UK, has said: "The exciting results emerging from TRACERx improve our understanding that cancer is a disease which evolves as it progresses, meaning that late-stage cancers can become very hard to treat successfully.
It is hoped that the study will allow scientists to better determine how cancer arises in the body, why some patients have a much worse survival that others and how the cancer will respond to treatment. Professor Charles Swanton - Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician and lead researcher on TRACERx- explains that “cancer is not static and the way we treat patients shouldn’t be either,”
Until the time (hopefully) comes that we can prevent cancers from occurring, the most effective way to currently treat cancer has to be to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse. The diagnosis and treatment of cancer is therefore clearly time sensitive with any delay potentially being the difference between survival and possibly premature end of life.
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