Experts in the genetics of cancer said on January 20 they have found out why some people can live for years with the same kind of rare pancreatic cancer that affects Apple CEO Steve Jobs. They identified new genes that, when mutated in a certain way, appear to cause a relatively less harmful form of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
Patients with these mutations lived twice as long as those whose tumours carried other mutations, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore report in the journal Science. "This is the new molecular view of cancer. The genetic makeup of the cancer will determine what the management (for) this person would be," Nickolas Papadopoulos, one of the researchers who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, killing 95 percent of patients within five years. But doctors realise that identifying cancer by the organ where it starts in only a very crude tool. Tumours vary in their aggressiveness and makeup, and studies show that particular genetic mutations may be more useful for deciding how to treat a patient and predicting how well he or she will do.
Pancreatic cancer is diagnosed in nearly 37,000 people a year in the United States and kills more than 34,000, according to the American Cancer Society.
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