Cancer: from mapping to prediction – how to anticipate the disease’s next move
Key points
At a time when images of war have painfully re-entered our daily lives, using a military metaphor to talk about medicine may seem inappropriate. Yet the distinction between indiscriminate bombing, reconnaissance and precision strikes effectively describes one of the transformations currently taking place in cancer research. With one fundamental difference: the aim is not to destroy, but to save lives.
For decades, many cancer treatments have worked like a carpet bombing: targeting rapidly dividing cancer cells, but also damaging healthy tissue and causing severe side effects. Precision medicine, on the other hand, seeks out specific vulnerabilities in cancer, selectively targeting what only cancer cells need to survive, whilst sparing healthy cells and tissues.
The importance of ‘maps’
Genome sequencing and other advances in biotechnology have provided us with a detailed map of the ‘territory’ of cancer. Today, we can observe mutations, chromosomal alterations and changes in gene activity within a tumour. However, knowing the map of an enemy city does not mean knowing which bridges, power stations or logistics hubs are indispensable to its army.
This is where Cancer Dependency Maps come into play. Using technologies such as CRISPR, genes are systematically inactivated in large collections of cancer cells in the laboratory, to identify which ones are essential for their survival. It is like carrying out controlled air strikes to identify the infrastructure which, when taken out of action, causes the greatest damage to the ‘enemy’ tumour. These maps have already revealed numerous weak points and are helping in the search for new therapeutic targets. There is, however, a limitation: we cannot test every possible gene or protein in every tumour.
Taking it one step further with “Precise”
The “Precise” consortium was set up to overcome this barrier. It brings together over 30 European researchers and, with Human Technopole among its founding institutes, aims to transform an atlas of observed vulnerabilities into a system capable of understanding and predicting the patterns underlying them. The scientific paper was published in *Nature Genetics* last August.
