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Mutations occur in the DNA of all dividing cells (both normal and cancerous) because of DNA replication errors or exogenous carcinogens, such as ultraviolet irradiation. Two classes of functional mutations have recently been suggested — “driver” mutations, which confer growth advantage on the cell, and “passenger” mutations, which are biologically neutral and confer no growth advantage. In a Herculean task, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute recently sequenced 518 protein kinase genes in 210 diverse human cancers. The protein kinase gene family was selected because it contains the most commonly known oncogenes and because inhibitors of mutated proteins offer tremendous therapeutic promise.
A total of 1007 mutations were found…