Genetic mapping reveals how cancer grows

Scientists all over the world have been trying to understand cancer, which is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, for many years.

Researchers have been trying to figure out where cancer comes from and what early treatments can help counter this illness.

Now, researchers have created a map of the prostrate which shows healthy areas and those that contain cancerous cells.

Experts from the Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden, the University of Oxford, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Science for Life Laboratory discovered that prostrate tumours have an unknown range of genetic variation.

The team saw what genetic changes take place in the tissue using spatial transcriptomics. Their work can play an immense role in improving early cancer diagnosis.

The study published in the journal Nature said that this technique was better because the older ones take samples from cancerous areas and study the DNA of cells with tumours only. Researchers said that prostrate cancer and others like it are three-dimensional and any one sample should hint toward a tumour.

The lead of the study, Alastair Lamb, said that they were “fairly sure” cancer started with genetic mutations. Lamb said that this amount of clarity was never there before.

To the surprise of the scientists, genetic characteristics of cancer were seen in healthy tissues too. 

In their vast study, researchers scrutinised 150,000 regions in two breast cancers, a lymph node, some skin, some brain tissue, and three prostrates to develop an algorithm that could track cells with similar genetic characteristics.

“Mapping thousands of tissue regions in a single experiment is an unprecedented approach to deconvolute the heterogeneity of tumours and their microenvironment,” said Professor Joakim Lundeberg of KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

He said that high-resolution views can change the way we look at the cancer ecosystem.