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THE International Cancer Genome Consortium, an alliance of laboratories that is trying to produce a definitive list of the genetic mutations that cause cancer, is accumulating data at an astonishing rate. About 3,000 individual breast tumours, for example, have now had their genotypes published. But these data will not, by themselves, help patients. For that, they have to be collected in the context of a drug trial. And this is just what Matthew Ellis and his colleagues at Washington University in St Louis have done for women suffering from breast cancer. Their methods, if they prove to work for other cancers too, may revolutionise treatment. 国际癌症基因组协作组（THE International Cancer Genome Consortium）是试图建立一份会引起癌症的基因突变完整清单的实验室联盟，它积累数据的速度让人吃惊。例如，它已经发表了大约3000种不同的乳房肿瘤的基因型。但光凭这些数据本身无法帮助患者。要医治病人，人们必须结合药物试验采集数据。而这正是在圣路易斯市的华盛顿大学（Washington University in St Louis）工作的马修?埃利斯（Matthew Ellis）及其同事们为罹患乳腺癌的妇女们所作的工作。如果事实证明他们的方法对其他癌症也有用的话，这可能会是癌症治疗的一次革命。 Dr Ellis and his team sequenced the whole genomes of both cancerous and normal tissue from 46 women with tumours of a type called oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer. They also sequenced just the gene-containing regions of the genome-about 1% of total DNA-from an additional 31 women, and parts of the sequences of 240 more. They then compared the healthy and tumorous genomes of each patient, in order to discover which genes had mutated in the cancer. | 
