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The National Cancer Institute estimates that as 2012 comes to an end, more than 143,000 people will have been diagnosed with colon and rectal cancer in the U.S., and that about 50,000 will die from the disease. But promising results from the lab of Raju Kucherlapati, PhD, of the Department of Medicine, suggest that common cancers, such as colorectal cancer, may see improved treatment through personalized medicine.
Kucherlapati presented his latest cancer findings from the Cancer Genome Atlas project at the BWH Biomedical Research Institute Translational Genetics Seminar last week. The $100 million-dollar-a-year project, funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute, involves renowned cancer researchers who are working together to sequence and analyze 25 different tumor types. Their findings will help clinicians better assess cancer risk, detect disease earlier, and decrease the cost of cancer therapies for patients.
"For the first time, I see the light at the end of the tunnel," said Kucherlapati. "We now have approaches to treat cancer patients more effectively than ever before."
Kucherlapati, who led the effort on the colorectal cancer front, found that there are a handful of cancers that share the same genetic mutations. Such a finding may allow clinicians to use existing medicines to treat a wider variety of cancers.
For instance, approximately five percent of the colon cancer tumors that Kucherlapati and his team assessed had extra copies of a gene called ERBB2. This same gene is also found in many breast cancer tumors and is usually treated with a medicine known as Herceptin. Now, clinicians may also consider using the drug in clinical trials to see if it is effective in treating colon cancer patients with the same gene mutation.
Although the road to curing cancer is long and arduous, Kucherlapati is hopeful that his findings from the project will prove beneficial in the fight against cancer.
"We want to treat cancer the way we treat HIV," said Kucherlapati. "We want to redefine cancer as a chronic disease. We may not yet have a cure, but cancer should not be a death sentence."