Canadian scientists researching breast cancer made an important breakthrough this month.

Scientists were able to decode the cancer tumor DNA and identify the mutations which cause the disease to spread.

Carly Weeks from the Globe and Mail reports:

The possibility of using a patient’s genetic information to create personalized therapies to battle cancer is one step closer to reality after Canadian scientists decoded, for the first time, the entire genome of a patient’s metastatic breast cancer.

It’s a landmark achievement that is helping to rewrite old notions about the way cancer develops and provides new insights into which drugs could benefit patients the most.

“I’m excited by the possibilities,” said Samuel Aparicio, the head of the department of breast and molecular oncology at the B.C. Cancer Agency and one of the lead scientists involved with the discovery. “In fact, I never thought I would see in my professional lifetime that it would become possible to routinely sequence genomes in the way that we’re now doing.”

Genomes contain all of the biological information of a living organism, and that information is housed in DNA. There are about three billion “letters” or building blocks in the human genome. When cells divide, all three billion building blocks must be copied. But mistakes in the copying process can sometimes occur, and those mutations can, in some cases, cause cells to grow in an uncontrolled way – which is how cancer develops.

In decoding the metastatic breast-cancer genome, which contains all of the genetic information of a patient’s cancer, scientists were able to identify all of the mutations in the tumour, a feat that has never before been accomplished.

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