For the first time, a team of scientists managed to decode all the genes of a person who suffered from cancer, having also been able to discover several mutations that might have caused the fatal disease to develop.

The study was conducted at Washington University in St. Louis, while the results published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Researchers used cells that had been donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the team having compared the affected by cancer cells’ DNA with the one from hear healthy skin cells in order to map the genome.

They found ten mutation in the cancerous cells, which rendered them incapable of responding well to chemotherapy, by virtue of an abnormal growth they were unable to fight off.

The mutations have been reported to had developed later in the patient’s life, thus scientists stated the proneness to cancer had not been inborn.

This recent project marks the first time a person’s entire DNA has been sequenced and also opens the door to further research concentrating on other types of cancer than leukemia, which is expected to be performed in the near future.

Richard K. Wilson, director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center and lead author of the study, has stated he hoped that in twenty years or less, scientists would be able to come to perform DNA sequencing by using only a drop of blood that was to be analyzed by a computer, which was afterwards to determine the drugs that would be most effective for each cancer patient.

Currently, there are only a few drugs that can treat cancer, such as Herceptin, given to women suffering from a certain type of breast cancer and Gleevec, used for a type of leukemia and a rare gastrointestinal cancer.