New Hope to Cancer Patients Offered By DNA Mapping

Cancer will become a manageable disease, thanks to a revolutionary treatment which will be available within five years predicts researchers.

All patients will soon have their tumour's DNA, its genetic code, sequenced, enabling doctors to ensure they give exactly the right drugs to keep the disease at bay, the Telegraph reported.

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Doctors hope it will be an important step towards transforming some types of cancer into a chronic rather than fatal disease.

The technique could enable terminally ill patients, who can currently expect to live only months, to carry on for a decade or more in relatively good health, according to specialists at the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

"We should be aspiring to cure cancer, but for people with advanced disease, it will be a question of managing them better so they survive for much longer - for many years," Prof Alan Ashworth, chief executive of the institute said.

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"Cancer often appears in people who are old, and if we can keep them alive long enough for them to die of something else, then we are turning cancer into a chronic disease," he said.

Prof Ashworth said that understanding of how different cancers were caused by different genetic triggers was building "incredibly rapidly".

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Genetic profiling of tumours is already used to some extent, but current methods only look for a few genes.

Women with advanced breast cancer are tested to see if their tumours have a particular variant of the HER2 gene, which causes a fifth of cases.

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Those with it are given Herceptin, but the same drug would do no good for those without the gene variant.

Advanced melanoma patients with a particular gene mutation are prescribed Vemurafenib, a pill that has been shown to increase survival, on average, from 9.6 to 13.2 months, and help patients feel much more energetic.

The institute wants to build a DNA database to identify lots of genes responsible for cancers.

It is launching a three-year, 30-million-pound project called the Tumour Profiling Unit to advance knowledge of the genetic profile of cancer.

Ashworth said that genetic profiling would make developing new drugs quicker and less expensive.

Source-ANI