The BBC is calling it "a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise." The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells. One of the world's leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a "new era". And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming. The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body. The classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably.... The researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is already there in our cell's DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous....
One in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old has some kind of cancer risk factor. When they are activated by the chemical alarm, they becomecancerous. The researchers were able to stop the growth of cancer in mice by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.
The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.
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