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scientists have decoded the complete genes in a single person’s cancer, allowing them to uncover eight new genes that could lead to better ways to treat the disease.

The Washington University professors ascertained ten gene mutations which appeared key to the development of the women’s acute myeloid leukaemia.

The researchers used malignant blood cells from a woman who later died from the disease, a cancer of blood-forming cells in the bone marrow, according to a paper in today’s Nature. Doctors mapped all the genes in her tumor cells, the compared them — side by side — with the genes in a normal cell from her skin.

That allowed them to see exactly how the DNA of cancer differs from healthy DNA, says author Timothy Ley, a professor of medicine and genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Previous efforts to decode individual human genomes have looked at common points of DNA variation that may be relevant for disease risk.

Doctors now use a designer drug to treat another type of leukemia, called chronic myeloid leukemia, as well as rare gastrointestinal tumor. That drug, Gleevec, is one of the few real breakthroughs in cancer. It works so well because it blocks the very first mutation involved in those cancers, says Gleevec’s developer, Brian Druker, a professor at the Oregon Health and Science University Knight Cancer Institute who says Ley’s techniques are incredibly promising.

Researchers already have developed a drug that blocks one of the well-known mutations in the woman’s leukemia cells, called FLT-3. That drug has had limited success, however, because the FLT-3 mutation happens relatively late in the cancer process, after a cell has already become abnormal, Druker says.

Ideally, he says, researchers will develop more drugs that block the earliest changes in cancer.