Our study suggests we could make changes to the way we treat oesophageal cancer.
- Rebecca Fitzgerald
The findings, published in Nature Genetics on Monday, could help find drugs that target specific weaknesses in each subtype of the disease, potentially making treatment more effective and boosting survival.
Researchers looked at the complete genetic make-up of 129 oesophageal cancers and were able to subdivide the disease into three distinct types based on patterns detected in the DNA of the cancer cells called signatures.
The first subtype they found had faults in their DNA repair pathways. Damage to this pathway is known to increase the risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. Patients with this subtype may benefit from a new family of drugs called PARP inhibitors that kill cancer cells by exploiting this weakness in their ability to repair DNA.
The second subtype had a higher number of DNA mistakes and more immune cells in the tumours, which suggests these patients could benefit from immunotherapy drugs already showing great promise in a number of cancer types such as skin cancer.
The final subtype had a DNA signature that is mainly associated with the cell ageing process and means this group might benefit from drugs targeting proteins on the surface of the cancer cells which make cells divide.
Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, lead researcher based at the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our study suggests we could make changes to the way we treat oesophageal cancer."
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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