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Tracking Down One of Cancer's Deadliest Culprits, the Ras Family of Genes


Tracking Down One of Cancer's Deadliest Culprits, the Ras Family of Genes

A row of vials filled with extract of human fecal material will be genetically screened in a ras gene bowel cancer study at the Applied Development Laboratory of the ICRF, England.

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/16/researchers-cracking-cancer-gene-ras-528043.html

Stashed in: Medicine, Cancer, Cancer

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"The three members of this family—kras, nras and hras—are responsible for nearly 30 percent of all human cancers. Kras is particularly frightening. Nearly all pancreatic cancers, about half of colorectal cancers and about a third of lung cancers contain mutant kras, which is involved in an estimated 1 million cancer deaths annually."

Finally making progress toward cures, too.

Although the role of ras in cancer has been recognized for more than 30 years, all efforts to create drugs to block the mutant Ras protein have thus far failed. But after years of frustration, researchers are finally hammering some cracks in this once impenetrable wall. “Now I can see a path forward for developing drugs against Kras,” says Frank McCormick, a cancer researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who is leading the four-year-old Ras Initiative at the National Cancer Institute. “I don’t see any massive impediment that will stop us.”

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