Evaluating cancer etiology and risk with a mathematical model of tumor evolution

Sophie Pénisson, Amaury Lambert and Cristian Tomasetti ()
Additional contact information
Sophie Pénisson: Center for Cancer Prevention and Early Detection
Amaury Lambert: Collège de France
Cristian Tomasetti: Center for Cancer Prevention and Early Detection

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Recent evidence arising from DNA sequencing of healthy human tissues has clearly indicated that our organs accumulate a relevant number of somatic mutations due to normal endogenous mutational processes, in addition to those caused by environmental factors. A deeper understanding of the evolution of this endogenous mutational load is critical for understanding what causes cancer. Here we present a mathematical model of tumor evolution that is able to predict the expected number of endogenous somatic mutations present in various tissue types of a patient at a given age. These predictions are then compared to those observed in patients. We also obtain an improved fitting of the variation in cancer incidence across cancer types, showing that the endogenous mutational processes can explain 4/5 of the variation in cancer risk. Overall, these results offer key insights into cancer etiology, by providing further evidence for the major role these endogenous processes play in cancer.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34760-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-34760-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34760-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().