Ewing's tumor genetics

Child cancer : Discovery of genetic susceptibility factors for Ewing's tumors. Institut Curie Foundation (France) and Nature Genetics. 2012-02-12

Cells from metastasized Ewing's sarcoma. Source: Plos Biology

Ewing's tumor is a rare form of bone cancer that affects children, with a higher occurrence frequency among populations of European origin. Olivier Delattre and his team, David Cox and Gilles Thomas have tried to understand why. The answer may be found in two small regions of the genome, with two genetic variants observed with a higher frequency among European populations. The risk of developing Ewing's tumor is twice higher for children who harbor one of these two genetic variations.This discovery is published online in Nature Genetics on February 12, 2012.

Cancer Genetics

Author: Robert Nussbaum Medical Geneticist The University of California, San Francisco

2008-07-28

What is Cancer?

Cancer is not a single disease, but rather, is the name used to describe the most dangerous form of neoplasia, a disease process characterized by abnormal, uncontrolled cell division leading to a mass or tumor.  Uncontrolled growth alone, however, does not make a tumor a cancer. For a tumor to be a cancer, it must not only grow inappropriately at the site where it originates (the primary) but must also demonstrate malignant behavior, that is, the capacity to invade normal tissues neighboring the site of the primary tumor and/or to seed new tumors at distant sites in the body (metastases). The surrounding normal tissue is also likely to play an important role, by providing the blood supply that nourishes the tumor, by permitting cancer cells to escape from the tumor and form metastases, and by shielding the tumor from attack by the body’s own defense mechanisms. Thus, cancer is a complex process, both within the tumor and between the tumor and the normal tissues that surround it.