What are the mutational landscape and significance of cancer? A recent study from Cyriac Kandoth and Michael D. McLellan told us the answer by a research across 12 major cancer types.

They have performed systematic analysis of the TCGA Pan-Cancer mutation data set, finding key insights for cancer genomes, as summarized in Extended Data Fig. . The data set contains 127 diverse SMGs, demonstrating that many cellular and enzymatic processes are involved in tumorigenesis. Notably, 66 of them are also on the ‘mut-driver genes’ list generated by a ratiometric method using COSMIC mutations. Although a common set of driver mutations exists in each cancer type, the combination of drivers within a cancer type and their distribution within the founding clone and subclones varies for individual patients. This suggests that knowing the clonal architecture of each patient’s tumour will be crucial for optimizing their treatment.

Given the rate at which TCGA and International Cancer Genome Consortium projects are generating genomic data, there are reasonable chances of identifying the ‘core’ cancer genes and pathways and tumour-type-specific genes and pathways in the near term. These results will be immediately circulated within the research community to assess their potential for candidate targets for diverse tumour types or for specific tumour type. Ultimately, these data and their associations with different clinical features and subtypes should contribute to the formulation of a reference candidate gene panel for all tumour types that could be helpful for prognosis at various clinical time points.

Reference

Cyriac Kandoth and Michael D. McLellan,etc., Mutational landscape and significance across 12 major cancer types, Nature 502,333–339(17 October 2013)︱doi:10.1038/nature12634