Breast cancer: Scientists hail 'milestone' genetic find

katcar, thank you for posting this. This is a remarkable, groundbreaking study for BC research. The researchers have painstakingly gone through the entire genetic code of several hundred breast cancers to come up with all Possible mutations that occur to drive BC. While it will not explain all cases of breast cancer, it will give them a stronger basis to predict many BC, and perhaps target prevention and treatment.

"To identify new cancer genes, we combined somatic substitutions and indels in protein-coding exons with data from other series^{12, 13, 14, 15, 26}, constituting a total of 1,332 breast cancers, and searched for mutation clustering in each gene beyond that expected by chance. Five cancer genes were found for which evidence was previously absent or equivocal (MED23, FOXP1, MLLT4, XBP1, ZFP36L1), or for which the mutations indicate the gene acts in breast cancer in a recessive rather than in a dominant fashion, as previously reported in other cancer types (see Supplementary Methods section 7.4 for detailed descriptions). From published reports on all cancer types (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/census), we then compiled a list of 727 human cancer genes (Supplementary Table 12). On the basis of driver mutations found previously, we defined conservative rules for somatic driver base substitutions and indel mutations in each gene and sought mutations conforming to these rules in the 560 breast cancers. We identified 916 probable driver mutations of these classes (Fig. 1b, Supplementary Table 14, Extended Data Fig. 1)."

And at a minimum they appear to have 5 new genes to add to genomic profiling tests

Hi guys I just received my reports in regards to biomarkers. Sifting thru them now. Now I have to figure out what this is going to do to help me. Sometimes it feels like each Cancer pt should be walking around with there own personal scientist.