Cancer is one of the most destructive diseases of past and present centuries. Certain treatments have been found, but they are damaging as well as invasive.

One of the treatments for breast cancer implies a mastectomy, which is an operation that involves removing the entire breast, and sometimes even both of them, depending on the type of cancer and how far it has spread. Chemotherapy is another course of treatment, which is damaging to your body.

It leads to hair loss, nausea, it interferes with bone marrow activity, it deteriorates the immune system and affects blood cell count overall. X-Ray therapy is another common course of treatment for cancer.

Moreover, the exact cause of cancer has yet to be found, which is one of the reasons for which all the current treatments are only targeting the tumors, basically the effect of cancer and not its causes.

Recently, researchers have made crucial progress in establishing what exactly causes cancer. Their chosen method was investigating the genetics of cancer. Their efforts were met with success, as scientists have finally managed to decode a full genome of a cancer patient. It was a premiere in the medical world, as researchers have nit yet had the opportunity to study a full set of cancer genes from a single patient. They consider this breakthrough as crucial to further understanding what goes wrong in a person’s genes that leads to developing the actual disease.

One interesting fact is that certain genes actually repel chemotherapy. Other genes even shut down a gene’s warning system, a system that usually prevents a cell from becoming a cancerous cell.

The study was conducted by the Washington University and was just publishes in the medical journey “Nature”.