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Smoking causes 37,000 genetic mutations in the body
Medical expert of the article
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
Lung cancer kills more people than any other form of cancer. More than 1.6 million people are diagnosed with it, and 20% of them don’t survive five years.
Smokers are 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smokers.
“None of us were surprised that smokers had more mutations in their genomes than people who had never smoked,” said senior author Richard Wilson, PhD, director of the Genome Institute at the University of Washington. “The real revelation was that smokers diagnosed with lung cancer had 10 times more mutations in their tumors than people who had never smoked.”
In total, about 37 thousand genetic changes in squamous cell lung cancer were identified.
“We’ve been sequencing the genomes of almost 1,000 cancer patients for a year. For the first time, we’ve seen the big picture, not just a peek through the keyhole,” says Ramaswamy Govindan, an oncologist at the University of Washington. “So we’re moving in the right direction — toward future clinical trials that will focus on the specific molecular biology of a patient’s cancer.”
The studies have identified new types of mutations and shown a clear difference between lung cancer in non-smokers and smokers. In addition, experts have found that the genetic changes in squamous cell lung cancer are more similar to those in squamous cell cancer of the head and neck than to other types of lung cancer.
This once again confirms that classification of cancers should be based on molecular profiles rather than their place of origin. This will allow the patient to be prescribed treatment that will be more effective.
According to the scientists, the prospects of the study results are obvious. Instead of gathering cancer patients into one large group and treating them en masse, they should be divided according to the categories of genetic changes and prescribed the appropriate treatment.
Therapies that target specific mutations are more effective and have fewer side effects.
A number of targeted drugs have already been approved for the treatment of adenocarcinoma (a malignant tumor consisting of glandular epithelial cells that make up most of the internal organs of the human body).
Scientists hope that the results obtained will become the basis for personalized treatment – more effective and tailored to the specific genetic characteristics of the patient’s tumor.
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