2024-02-16 15:33:00
Madrid, Feb 16 (EFE).- Biochemist and researcher Mariano Barbacid warned this Friday that the vast majority of genes mutated in cancer are not pharmacologically addressable, “and this is one of the great limitations of precision medicine.” .
Barbacid, which closed the first day of precision medicine and onco-pathological approach in pediatric and young adult tumors, at the La Paz university hospital, has pointed out that in childhood tumors with very few additional mutations it is possible to cure with a single drug, but in adults, with advanced tumors and so many mutations, it is “impossible” for a single drug to work.
This scientist, who also directs the pancreatic cancer research project of the CRIS Foundation once morest cancer, has pointed out that “the good news in precision medicine” is that thanks to tumor DNA sequencing, almost all mutations are now known. implicated in human cancer, “but the bad news is that there are many of them.
He specified that although not all of them are involved – “because otherwise it would be a case of throwing in the towel” – in the case of lung adenocarcinoma, there are more than 30,000 mutations, which makes it “a difficult beast to work with.”
Barbacid has explained that the great challenge of precision medicine is “resistance” that has multiple causes and has clarified that cancer “is not a tumor cell that has grown a lot, the problem is that they are not the same cells”, and Even if a new drug eliminates the main mutation, new ones appear once more.
“And as long as there is tumor heterogeneity, precision medicine has a big problem,” he said.
For this reason, he has considered that the future of precision medicine involves using “degrading inhibitors” (drugs intended to reprogram the proteins responsible for cancer) that act once morest various mutations, but another problem also arises there: toxicity, which limits treatments. .
In short, Barbacid has considered that this is the “Gordian knot” that must be overcome so that “precision medicine is more useful than it is today, especially in solid, adult and advanced tumors, which are the ones that cause more deaths.”
Barbacid, which 40 years ago discovered the KRAS oncogene responsible for the onset of pancreatic cancer, has also pointed to this oncogene as the most urgent challenge for precision medicine since it is mutated in a quarter of all adult tumors, especially in the two most frequent (lung and colorectal) and the first in aggressiveness, that of the pancreas, with a survival of 5%.
Regarding this last tumor, he referred to work by a Michigan researcher, in which the pancreas of people who died for reasons other than cancer were analyzed. Preneoplastic lesions of the KRAS oncogene were found in practically all of these pancreases, which the scientist considered “worrying.”
Finally, he insisted that if these tumors might be cured with precision medicine “it would be one of the greatest advances in oncology.” EFE
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