Government researchers in the United States have this week launched a pilot project to find all the little genetic changes that cause cancer in the hope it will lead to a whole new world of targeted cancer therapy.
They hope the work will enable them to replicate the successes of the few targeted cancer therapies such as Herceptin, useful against one type of breast cancer, and Gleevec, a drug that has revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia.
Scientists already know that cancer is a genetic disease, caused by mutations or other changes in the DNA of cells, but to date no one has done a systematic analysis of all the mutations in various tumours.
The Cancer Genome Atlas project launched by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute means to make a start on realising that goal.
"Cancer" describes a range of at least 200 different diseases and it is the second leading killer in most industrialized countries, after heart disease.
Modern treatments mean that now about 60 percent of patients are alive five years after the initial diagnosis.
Lung cancer or breast cancer are blanket terms for tumours that arise because of differing genetic mistakes.
Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, director of the National Cancer Institute and the acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, says the cancer genome atlas project is about making the necessary progress so that cancer is a chronic and manageable condition that no longer causes the suffering and death that is seen.
The researchers are as yet unsure which cancers they will tackle first but say it will be a small number.
They will need hundreds of samples from hundreds of patients with the selected tumour types and then use the human genome map made at NHGRI to try and find all the changes that mark cancer.
Apparently several cancer-causing mutations, called oncogenes, are known already.