The investigators demonstrated that the mutations increase PIK3CA kinase activity, which can start a cascade of cellular events that spark a normal cell to grow uncontrollably and become cancerous.

We envision future cancer therapy as personalized, based on gene mutations in each patient ™s tumor, says Velculescu.  This kind of information, gleaned from sequencing a patient ™s tumor, means drugs could be targeted to just the right molecular pathway at just the right time and potentially be more effective with fewer side effects.

Most of the PIK3CA mutations described in the current paper are located in two DNA cancer hot spots, thus making molecular diagnostic tests possibly easier to develop.  These mutations, added to a panel of existing markers for colon cancer developed in our laboratory, could help find cancers that would otherwise go undetected, says Yardena Samuels, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow and first author of the study.

The researchers are now looking more closely at the role of PIK3CA in tumor development and are working on identifying compounds that could target tumors with mutations in this gene.