Cancer News, Treatment and Research

Using increasingly cheap and rapid methods to read the billions of “letters” that comprise human genomes – including the genomes of individual cells sampled from cancerous tumors — scientists are generating far more data than they can easily interpret. Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have published a mathematical method of simplifying and interpreting genome data bearing evidence of mutations, such as those that characterize specific cancers. Not only is the technique highly accurate; it has immediate utility in efforts to parse tumor cells, in order to determine a patient’s prognosis and the best approach to treatment.