An international team, including scientists from EMBL and EMBL-EBI, has completed the most comprehensive study of whole cancer genomes to date, significantly improving our fundamental understanding of cancer and marking out new directions for its diagnosis and treatment. A key finding is that it’s possible to identify mutations in the genome that occurred years, or even decades, before a tumour appears – theoretically opening a window of opportunity for early cancer detection. The results of the project are published today in more than 20 papers in Nature and its affiliated journals.

The Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project is a collaboration involving more than 1300 scientists and clinicians from 37 countries. It involved analysis of more than 2600 genomes of 38 different tumour types, creating a huge resource of primary cancer genomes. This was the starting point for 16 working groups to study multiple aspects of cancer development, causation, progression, and classification. “This huge international study was only possible due to the work and collaboration of more than a thousand researchers and clinicians across the world, and I would like to thank everyone involved,” says Pan-Cancer steering committee member Dr. Jan Korbel from EMBL Heidelberg