140 cancer subtypes advance revealed

MORE than 140 new cancer subtypes have been identified by a citizen science project that has radically changed our understanding of one of the nation’s biggest killers.

The breakthrough could lead to precision diagnoses of individuals’ cancers and more successful treatments for a disease that kills 46,000 Australians a year.

Scientists hope to experiment on mice to test which medications work best on newly identified cancer subtypes.

Researchers at The Garvan Institute in Sydney developed a new way to classify cancers by using the computing power of smartphones donated through Vodaphone’s Dreamlab project.

Traditionally, people think of cancer as being specific to a body part, such as lung cancer or breast cancer. But researchers recently learned that DNA changes in an individual’s cancer, rather than its tissue of origin, determine how best to treat and manage it.

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute has been studying the molecular basis of childhood cancers and how understanding this can translate to better treatment.

For example, there are at least four different molecular types of breast cancer, and the treatments for each differ.

To date, researchers have looked for DNA changes in one or a few genes at a time to better understand cancer.

But the new DreamLab research looked for changes in groups of seven to 20 genes.

The Garvan team matched the gene changes in cancers from 3750 people with the corresponding protein changes across about 20,000 proteins.