What does too many copies of a part of a chromosome in pancreas cancer tell us? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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There are too many copies of one arm of chromosome one in pancreas cancer, a Johns Hopkins study finds. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Hopkins, says the stage of tumor development where this finding was seen also matters.

Nelson: They didn't see it in the high grade precursor lesions quite commonly which suggests that first of all there's probably a driver more early on in the development of pancreas cancer than in the phase of lesions that we call cancers, so it's actually pretty early on. I would say could you develop some kind of DNA sequence based assay to look for a change like this or to look for a change like this in shed cells. You could I suspect. I think the more promising avenues that leads towards opportunities for treatments.  :31

Treatment possibilities rest on the fact that in this area of the gene are the blueprints for certain enzymes that are important for cancer growth and development, and for which inhibitors have already been developed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.