It is probably easy to forget it with all of the baseball and politics flying around this page, but I am a biologist and that is what currently pays most of my bills. As a biologist, I do try to keep up on the interesting goings-on in my field, which happens to be somewhere between genetics and genomics. To that end, I printed out a research article about a week ago to read on the train, so naturally I just got around to reading it. The title, “A renewed model of pancreatic cancer evolution based on genomic rearrangement patterns,” caught my eye because DNA rearrangement is something of an interest of mine. Little did I know I would nearly cry while reading this paper.
Pancreatic cancer is interesting among cancers because it tends to go undiagnosed until a relatively late stage. By that time, it is often hard to stop metastasis of the primary tumor to other organs, leading to a pretty short five year survival rate. Due to the loss of life that pancreatic cancer causes, it represents an active field of research. Specifically, a group in Toronto looked at the genetic changes that have to happen in a precancerous lump of cells in the pancreas in order to allow those cells to break from the main tumor and metastasize to other organs, which is how cancer causes the most damage. A popular model to explain the progression of pancreatic cancer dictates that a specific series of gene mutations has to occur in order to allow a precancerous cell to get to the point where metastasis can occur. Interestingly, this group showed that precancerous cells often did not exhibit the step-by-step accumulation of mutations that we thought would lead to metastasis. Instead, many tumors show signatures of simultaneous mutations that could only occur in the event of whole chromosome rearrangements. Which takes us right back to the DNA rearrangement that I am interested in.
Now let me address how I ended that first paragraph. I do not usually get emotional while I am reading papers, but I do not usually read papers that study case-by-case examples of patients who died of pancreatic cancer. It is incredible to think that there could be something growing inside you right now that will kill you in mere months or years. Tragedies like this are enough to make me not want to get out of bed in the morning, because what’s the point? Anything can happen tomorrow: “Pcsi_0410” was a real person with real friends and a family and ideas and a personality, but now they are just Figure 2 in a Nature paper. But I want to thank Pcsi_0410 for teaching us a little more about a terrifying disease that we all want to learn to treat more effectively. Maybe this is the only way we can make the best of pancreatic cancer. People are going to be unlucky and die from it, but we humans have been trying to make sense of shit like this for millennia. We will continue to try to solve the pancreatic cancer mystery, but we need people like Pcsi_0410, who were dealt a shit hand but use it to help others. But as scientists, let’s never forget the important sacrifice that some people have to make in order for us to get some cool sequencing data.
If you like to read the primary literature, check out the paper I talked about at Nature.
developingbio 