A multicenter study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins University just reported on a full genomic analysis of tumor samples from a small number of people who died of pancreatic cancer. The new data suggests that epigenetic changes control how DNA operates to confer survival advantages on subsets of pancreatic cancer cells.
“Changes in genes’ regulation—not in the DNA sequence of genes themselves—were the driving force behind successful metastases in our experiments, and, as far as we know, this is the first genome-wide experimental evidence for this phenomenon.”
