New research: Clues about origins of lung cancer in non-smokers

These insights will help unlock the mystery of how lung cancer arises in people who have no history of smoking and may guide the development of more precise clinical treatments.

A genomic analysis of lung cancer in people with no history of smoking has found that a majority of these tumours arise from the accumulation of mutations caused by natural processes in the body.

This study was conducted by an international team led by researchers at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The findings, published on Monday in Nature Genetics, describes three molecular subtypes of lung cancer in people who have never smoked.

These insights will help unlock the mystery of how lung cancer arises in people who have no history of smoking and may guide the development of more precise clinical treatments, the NIH said in a press release.

The researchers used whole-genome sequencing to characterise the genomic changes in tumour tissue and matched normal tissue from 232 never smokers, who had been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. The patients had not yet undergone treatment for their cancer.

The researchers discovered that a majority of the tumour genomes of never smokers bore mutational signatures associated with damage from endogenous processes, that is, natural processes that happen inside the body.

Source: NIH (US)

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