Every year around 450,000 people in Germany are diagnosed with cancer. Each one of them dreams of a victory in the battle against it. But can cancer ever be completely defeated? Researchers at Kiel University (CAU) have now reached a sobering（清醒的，严重的） conclusion: "cancer is as old as multi-cellular life on earth and will probably never be completely eradicated," says Professor Thomas Bosch in his latest research results. The study by an international team led by Bosch was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. The so-called cancer genes² are ancient

 

The causes of tumors are the so-called cancer genes. As from when evolution started producing tumors is an issue that the scientists Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary⁴ Biology in Plön have been investigating for several years, using bio-informational methods and databases that they have developed in-house. "During the search for the origin of the cancer gene¹, we unexpectedly made a discovery in the ancient group of animals," explains Domazet-Lošo. He is one of the authors of the present study and is currently working at the Ruder Bošković Institute and the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb. "Our data predicted that the first multi-cellular animals already had most of the genes which can cause cancer in humans." What was missing until now was, on the one hand, evidence that these animals can actually suffer from tumors and, on the other, the molecular⁵ understanding of the mechanisms⁶ of tumor³ formation in these simple animals.

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