Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have made the discovery and used this new knowledge to determine the risk of relapse up to a year
Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have made the discovery and used this new knowledge to determine the risk of relapse up to a year before the cancer returns.
The TRACERx lung cancer study, funded by Cancer Research UK, is the first study to look at the evolution of cancer in real time and such detail.
Researchers followed patients from diagnosis through to either disease relapse or cure after surgery, tracking and analysing how their cancer developed.
Professor Charles Swanton, the study's lead researcher based at the Crick, said: "The TRACERx study is Cancer Research UK's single biggest investment in lung cancer, and for the first time we've revealed new insights into how tumours evolve and evade treatment, a leading cause of cancer death.
"We believe that this invaluable data generated during TRACERx will be seized upon by research teams across the world, helping us to answer more questions about lung cancer biology. We've only scraped the surface in terms of what is possible by looking at tumour evolution in such detail."
The team has published two papers on this work, one in the New England Journal of Medicine and one in Nature.