New ‘Pan-Cancer’ analysis reveals the common roots of different cancers

Share This:

email

Twitter

Linkedin

Facebook

By Aylin Woodward
UC Santa Cruz

April 5, 2018 — Santa Cruz, CA

(Image above: The Pan-Cancer Atlas is the most comprehensive cross-cancer analysis to date and is the final output of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program, a joint effort of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Cancer researchers analyzed and classified over 10,000 tumors representing 33 different types of cancer to trace the connections between different cancers. Source: UCSC)

In the largest study of its kind, cancer researchers analyzed and classified more than 10,000 tumors from 33 cancer types to trace connections between different cancers

Typically cancers are classified by where they originate in the body—think breast cancer, stomach cancer, and so on. But a collaboration called the Pan-Cancer Initiative, launched in 2012 at a meeting in Santa Cruz, California, sought to study cancers from a new angle—a molecular one. Preliminary analyses showed cancers that start in different organs actually share commonalities at the molecular level, whereas cancers that originate from the same tissue can have very different genomic profiles.

Now, the Pan-Cancer Initiative has released the results of a much larger analysis of genomic and molecular data characterizing 33 different types of cancer from more than 10,000 patients. Called the Pan-Cancer Atlas, it is the most comprehensive cross-cancer analysis to date and is the final output of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program, a joint effort of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The results appear in 27 papers published April 5 in Cell, Cancer Cell, Cell Reports, and 27 papers published April 5 in Cell, Cancer Cell, Cell Reports, and Immunity.

“Insights about how one type of cancer relates to another form of the disease can have real clinical implications,” said Josh Stuart, Baskin Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and an organizer of the Pan-Cancer Initiative. “In some cases, we can borrow clinical practices from better-known diseases and apply them to cancers for which treatment options are less well defined.”

Continue reading article here: https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/04/pan-cancer-atlas.html

###

Tagged Baskin School of Engineering, Genomics Institute, UC Santa Cruz