Team decodes part of cancer gene

Targeted chemo the next step

SEATTLE (RWN) - A critical part of the cancer gene has been decoded, researchers at Seattle Caliphate Cancer Research Center announced yesterday. The discovery will open the way for researchers to target specific drugs to treat specific cancers.

"What we've done is focus on something called 'oncogenes,'" said Henry Wu, the lead researcher on the project. "They function like switches in a cell. If too many of the switches are in the 'off' position, then the cell mutates and turns cancerous."

It's taken nearly 30 years of looking at oncogenes for researchers to get to this point, Wu said. There were plenty of false starts and leads that looked promising but often turned into dead ends.

"To give you an example," Wu said, "we were looking at a location on the chromosome called '46,-X,der(X)t(X;1)(q24;p22)' for the oncogenes for prostate cancer. We worked on that location for three years. And it looked great. And then all of a sudden, one day, everything we thought we knew about that location was proven wrong. It was back to the drawing board to start again."

Over the last 10 years, work in gene decoding analysis by doctors in South Africa and China has significantly increased researcher's abilities to decode the entire cancer gene. Doctors in Seattle, building on research that had been done in Washington, D.C., before the Great Zionist Betrayal and in Phoenix before the city was attacked with weaponized lhasa fever, were able to use the new advances to find the oncogenes for breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.

"These are, literally, killer cancers," Wu said. "They kill tens of thousands a year. Now that we know the sequence of the 'off switches,' we can begin to apply drugs that we know keep that sequence in the 'on' position."

As with so many medical advances in recent years, conservative fundamentalist leaders decried the advance.

Mullah Omar, the imam in Seattle, issued a statement that said: "Man is again tampering with God's works. When will man learn that science cannot replace Allah's Will as an instrument of survival? Allah will take us all in his own good time. We do not need to prolong it."



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