Sanger Institute unlocks skin and lung cancer genetic codes

The studies, published in the journal ‘Nature’, of a malignant melanoma and a lung cancer, reveal for the first time almost all of the mutations in the genomes of two cancers. All cancers are caused by mutations in the DNA of cancer cells which are acquired during a person’s lifetime. Professor Mike Stratton, from the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: “These are the two main cancers in the developed world for which we know the primary exposure. For lung cancer, it is cigarette smoke and for malignant melanoma it is exposure to sunlight. “With these ge...