More Proof That Smoking Leads to Small-Cell Lung Cancer

In a Nature article published earlier this week, UK and US researchers have provided more proof that smoking has a direct effect on the development of small-cell lung cancer. This study describes 22,910 somatic mutations characterized by massively parallel sequencing technology (including 134 in highly important exon coding regions) in the small-cell lung cancer cell line NCI-H209 (karyotype pictured). These mutations disrupt many of the pathways that are vital to preservation of cell growth and division regulation.

As the authors note, the more than 60 carcinogenic chemicals in cigarettes greatly increase the number of mutations by binding and chemically modifying DNA, thus increasing the presence of cancer in lunch cells due to cancer being driven by mutations. This has been suggested to explain the 20x increase in cancer in smoking patients than in non-smoking patients.

This study has provided a huge amount of mutation information for small-cell lung cancer research and will likely lead to vast increases in identifying the specific chemical causes of each mutation.

Read the original article at Nature as an Advanced Online Publication: A small-cell lung cancer genome with complex signatures of tobacco exposure.

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