" ...have documented 80 different types of an aggressive form of breast cancer, called triple negative, defined by the absence of three hormone
receptors. Triple negative breast cancers represent about 16 per cent of breast cancers and, until the BC Cancer Agency’s work, had been treated as a single disease, often with little success. “The great advance of genomics is that we can now see how different they all are,” said Marra. Marra and Aparicio also found that cells within a single breast cancer tumour may contain different mutations, thus creating a mosaic of cells all evolving independently that each respond to treatment differently. That means drugs that kill cells with a specific mutation could easily leave other cancer cells unscathed to start new tumours. Cancer treatments would have to be targeted to the genome of all the cancer cells in a tumour to be effective, he said."
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Tumour cell genome studies give rise to individualized therapy