Credit: Huntsman Cancer Institute (for Mason and Feusier) and St. Jude (for Arunachalam)
SALT LAKE CITY - Utah researchers report significant new insights into the development of blood cancers. In work published today in
Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, scientists describe an analysis of published data from more than 7,000 patients diagnosed with leukemia and other blood disorders. Their findings provide new clues about mutations that may initiate cancer development and those that may help cancer to progress.
The researchers sought to identify mutation hotspots, or frequent changes in specific locations of the cancer patients genetic information. The researchers then used these hotspots to look for whether the same mutations were present in the DNA data of more than 4,500 people who were not known to have a cancer diagnosis. They found that approximately 2 percent of these presumably healthy participants had, at low levels, mutat