Fighting cancer like 'guerilla war'

Fighting cancer is akin to taking on insurgents in a "guerilla war", the most detailed studies yet of two lethal tumours have revealed.

Scientists who produced genetic blueprints of deadly brain and pancreatic cancers found a plethora of defective biological pathways in both, many of which were previously unknown.

The findings suggest that a conventional war on cancer is unlikely to succeed, according to US expert Professor Kenneth Kinzler, one of the researchers involved.

"The landscape of human cancers is clearly more complex than has been previously appreciated," said Prof Kinzler, from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Fighting it is going to be more of a guerilla war than a conventional one because there are dozens of mutated genes in each tumour. Individually, these mutations don't seem formidable. But working together, they form an enemy that will require us to develop novel strategies to combat them, and the best long-term strategy may be early detection of tumours, when the number of guerilla warriors is still small and more easily handled."

Two teams looked at pancreatic cancer and the most common and dangerous form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Their results were published in online versions of the journals Science and Nature.

Both diseases have a reputation for being difficult to treat.

Co-author Dr David Wheeler, Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, US, said: "Studies like this show the breadth of mutation across many genes. We can see the mutations in all the genes of each pathway that control growth, replication and death in the cancer cell.

"Researchers have never seen the whole landscape like this before, and it's providing many new insights into strategies to diagnose and treat cancer."

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