Often cancer research goes like this: study cancerous cells in a lab dish, find mutations that appear in many of the samples, develop drugs to target proteins made by the mutated genes, and voila, new chemotherapy drugs are born. Or at least that’s the hope. The problem with this approach is that while some mutations do lead to cancer, others just tag along, frequently occurring but not driving the cancer to spread. New research under the direction of Paul Khavari, MD, PhD, professor in the Program in Epithelial Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the dermatology service at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Healthcare System, shows a novel and more effective way of testing which mutations cause cancer and which are mere research distractions. The work is published in the June issue of Nature Genetics.
