Quote

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it's genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we're getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person's cancer.

A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.

Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.

Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.

We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.