In a long-term fight to combat cancer by improving medical treatment, scientists are currently hoping to discover the cure by means of mapping it.

In an attempt to prove the presumption may be part of reality, researchers use powerful gene-sequencing machines in order to find which genetic changes trigger which form of cancer. Their aim is to provide distinguished treatment to people suffering from the disease, based on their distinct tumor profiles, because "if you have 100 patients, you have 100 different diseases," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The new maps don’t involve only mutated genes. What they do is citing the missing ones, additional ones, as well as overactive or underactive ones, The Associated Press reported.

However, it’s a long way to go until the goal set by scientists will be achieved. There is still plenty of work to do, and impediments continue appearing. For instance, while experts were looking forward to detect some particular important genes that were commonly mutated, they spotted quite a lot of genes mutated in a smaller part of the tumors.

As reported this week in three studies, published in the journals Science and Nature, experts claimed to have found a presumptive way to treat a deadly form of brain cancer and to have enabled the access to finding the tumor before extending, when a surgery can still be the performed.

"Cancer is very complex, more complex than we had believed. It is not going to be easy to develop therapies," Dr. Vogelstein stated.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University looked at over 20,000 genes in tumors taken from 24 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and 22 patients diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and most aggressive type of primary brain tumor. In another study, about 600 genes in 206 glioblastoma patients were examined.

The teams form America's first research university detected hundreds of genetic alterations, gene IDH1 counting among them. In line with The Associated Press, 12% of patients who had glioblastoma, especially juvenile ones, harbored a mutated version that lead to a longer survival – an average of 3.8 years, in contrast with 1.1 years for patients who didn’t have the mutation.

Extra studies will be conducted. If they are to demonstrate what researchers suggest, physicians may soon be allowed to use an IDH1 test to assist establishing prognosis, stated Dr. Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and a co-author of two papers in the journal Science.

Furthermore, researchers also found that all the tumors were different. The classic pancreatic cancer had 63 genetic changes and the regular brain tumor 60.

The breakthrough is “the next wave," according to Dr. Phillip Febbo of Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, who was unconnected with the research. The most important aspect “is that finding those common elements within the landscape suggests there are therapeutic interventions that can help the whole group," he said.