Some lung cancers can remain dormant for as long as 20 years before turning aggressive and quickly metastasizing. Researchers learned as much after studying tumor growth in seven lung cancer patients, including smokers, ex-smokers and a patient who had never smoked.
While the researchers found smoking was strongly implicated in instigating the early genetic faults that first triggered the formation of a tumor -- these tumors remained hidden for as long as two decades before later genetic defects prompted the tumor to begin growing suddenly and rapidly.
The study -- carried out by researchers from Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute and the University College London's Cancer Institute -- determined that the later genetic deformities, the most fatal of the flaws, were less related to the act of smoking.
While doctors continue to make progress in treating a number of other cancers, lung cancer remains almost as deadly as it was 20 years ago. One of the reasons for that is the disease continues to go undetected until it's in its later stages and treatments are less effective. Thus, finding ways to detect lung cancer earlier is one of the keys to battling the disease.
"Survival from lung cancer remains devastatingly low with many new targeted treatments making a limited impact on the disease," study author Charles Swanton said in a press release. "By understanding how it develops we've opened up the disease's evolutionary rule book in the hope that we can start to predict its next steps."
"This fascinating research highlights the need to find better ways to detect lung cancer earlier when it's still following just one evolutionary path," added co-author Nic Jones. "If we can nip the disease in the bud and treat it before it has started travelling down different evolutionary routes we could make a real difference in helping more people survive the disease."
"Building on this work Cancer Research UK is funding a study called TRACERx which is studying 100s of patient's lung cancers as they evolve over time to find out exactly how lung cancers mutate, adapt and become resistant to treatments," Jones added.
The study was published this week in the journal Science.