Are we facing the end of cancer as we know it? Maybe yes, hopefully yes. Only a few hours after celebrating International Cancer Day, we have learned the results of the largest genomic study of cancer carried out to date , a study in which 1,300 scientists from 37 different countries have participated and in which more than 2,500 have been analyzed. patients with 38 different tumor types.
What is cancer and how does it develop has always been the big question and as a great answer, although there is still much to be defined, it has been learned that the first mutations that lead to cancer occur even decades before diagnosis. And, best of all, how and why this tumor has arisen, which opens a field to date unthinkable to launch studies for the premature diagnosis of the disease.
The Pan-Cancer project is like a large open book but with very specific guidelines and with the very necessary reasons for how it is triggered in all types of tumors, and the definitive impulse to stand up to the disease and defeat it. The result of ten million hours of analysis and study, almost nothing, in which billions of variables and markers have been studied.
The possibility of having 'controlled' what changes make it very likely that more than thirty types of cancer will be triggered and their patterns is the news that we all wanted and wanted to hear. Cancer is a disease that we have all suffered, in ourselves and in our environment. And it is chilling to think that 1 in 3 people suffer from it. How positive it is, after this global study, to be able to conclude that the cancer genome can be known, and therefore establish causes, prevention and cure. The door to the development of tests and treatments , something like understanding once a disease that is doing us so much damage. It seems like a dream, right? But we are brushing it with our fingers. We are still struggling.
