Friday, September 08, 2006

Genes and cancer

I start the week with a post about something really exciting that I read in Science. Unfortunately my institution does not have access to articles in Science published online before they have been printed on paper so I had to be satisfied for the time being with the reports pusblished by conventional media like the Washington Post.

It seems that researchers have screened for and found 189 genes that are altered in colon and breast cancers. Although we are talking about only two types of cancer, breast and colon cancer are two of the most diagnosed cancers in the western hemisphere. It is remarkable that both types of cancer share very few cancer-related genes and that most of the genes discovered to have a role in these cancers have not been known to be so before.

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