ONE of the great hopes nurtured by the Human Genome Project was that it would crack cancer open. Knowing which genes were going wrong would, the theory went, allow specifically tailored drugs to be developed. And this is, indeed, happening. Only last month America's Food and Drug Administration approved a medicine called Xalkori (generically, crizotinib) for patients who have a particular type of non-small-cell lung cancer, the most common form of that disease. Xalkori blocks the growth of tumours caused by a mutant form of the gene which encodes a signalling molecule known as anaplastic lym-phoma kinase. This mutation occurs in 3-5% of lung-cancer patients, and in trials Xalkori caused a dramatic shrinkage of the tumour in around half of those treated.
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