Scientists have made crucial progress in establishing what exactly causes cancer. They investigated the genetics of cancer and successfully concluded after to decoding a full genome of a cancer patient that what goes wrong in a person's genes is what leads to developing the actual disease.

A team at the Washington University's Genome Sequencing Centre (GSC) in St. Louis sequenced the genome of the woman in her 50s who died and the genome of her leukemia cells, to identify genetic changes unique to her cancer.

Richard K. Wilson, director of Washington University's GSC said, ”Our work demonstrates the power of sequencing entire genomes to discover novel cancer-related mutations.....A genome-wide understanding of cancer, which is now possible with faster, cheaper DNA sequencing technology is the foundation for developing more effective ways to diagnose and treat cancer."

Previous efforts to decode individual human genomes have looked at common points of DNA variation that may be relevant for disease risk. First co-author Timothy Ley, hematologist and professor of Medicine at WU said, "Until now, no one has sequenced a patient's genome to find all the mutations that are unique to that person's disease...We didn't know what we would find, but we felt that the answers to why this patient had AML had to be embedded in her DNA."

The study was published in the medical journal 'Nature'.