Abstract
Our efforts to fully understand cancer have always been shaped by the methods and technologies that can be applied to the study of genes. Emerging recombinant DNA technologies allowed Bishop and Varmus to build on the prior observations of Rous to identify the first oncogene—and in the process, to bring the study of cancer into the molecular age. Subsequent developments, from PCR to increasingly powerful methods for DNA sequencing, have allowed scientists to delve ever more broadly and deeply into the genome of the cancer cell.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Driver gene’ and ‘mut-driver gene’ are synonyms for the more generic term ‘cancer gene’ that is used throughout this book. The term mut-driver gene was coined by Kinzler and Vogelstein to distinguish such genes from epi-driver genes, which are cancer genes that are functionally altered by epigenetic mechanisms.
- 2.
Several additional high-probability cancer genes have been described since this 2013 study.
Further Reading
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Tomasetti C, Vogelstein B, Parmigiani G (2013) Half or more of the somatic mutations in cancers of self-renewing tissues originate prior to tumor initiation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:1999–2004
Tomasetti C, Marchionni L, Nowak MA, Parmigiani G, Vogelstein B (2015) Only three driver gene mutations are required for the development of lung and colorectal cancers. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 112:118–123
Vogelstein B, Papadopoulos N, Velculescu VE, Zhou S, Diaz LA Jr, Kinzler KW (2013) Cancer genome landscapes. Science 339:1546–1558
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Bunz, F. (2016). Cancer Genomes. In: Principles of Cancer Genetics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7484-0_5
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