Whether p16 can be considered to be a driver mutation requires further investigation.

The goal is to find the driver mutations of each patient's data and recommend specific treatments based on that information.

Cancer can take years or even decades to develop, as cells gradually accumulate the necessary driver mutations.

This may in turn identify the key driver mutations (seen in initial tumour samples).

Tumors may become dormant, or even regress, but growth can start up again if new driver mutations are acquired.

They found that during the long periods between acquisition of driver mutations, many passenger mutations arose.

In the study, 97 percent of the driver mutations were the primary driver of the cancer, making them useful for selecting specific drugs, he said.

Cross-species genomics matches driver mutations and cell compartments to model ependymoma.

Driver mutations tend to cause clonal expansions.

A driver mutation conferring elevated PLD2 activity has been observed in several malignant breast cancers.

As noted above, about 3 or 4 driver mutations and 60 passenger mutations occur in the exome (protein coding region) of a cancer.

In current studies, the researchers are comparing cancer cell lines that have identical driver mutations but a different load of passenger mutations, to see which grow faster.

"The next step will be to understand what's driving this diversity in different cancers and identify key driver mutations that are common throughout all parts of a tumor," Swanton said.

Thus, IDH1 or IDH2 mutations act as driver mutations in glioma carcinogenesis, though it is not clear by which role they are primarily acting.

Genomic sequencing identifies two specific types of mutations: driver mutations, which are responsible for cancer, and passenger mutations, which are irrelevant to tumor development.

Majumder and colleagues used a systems biology approach called tumor explant model to distinguish driver mutations, or those that are critical for a tumor's survival, from passenger mutations.

A major goal of cancer genome sequencing is to identify driver mutations: genetic changes which increase the mutation rate in the cell, leading to more rapid tumor evolution and metastasis.

"We don't believe that the telomerase gene in melanoma is mutated by pure chance, but that it is a so-called driver mutation that drives carcinogenesis," says Rajiv Kumar.

When one of the cancerous cells gains a new driver mutation, that cell and its progeny take over the entire population, bringing along all of the original cell's baggage of passenger mutations.

"Driver mutations control cancer growth," Dr. Mark Kris, chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, told the press conference.

Not very much is known about the specific functional characteristics of MLYK4, but it has recently been found that the gene may possibly have a role in having at least one driver mutation for cancer.

A statistical algorithm designed by co-author Raul Rabadan, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics and systems biology, was then used to identify the mutations most likely to be driver mutations.

It is a driver mutation in a proportion of certain diagnoses, including melanoma, hairy cell leukemia, papillary thyroid carcinoma, colorectal cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer, Langerhans cell histiocytosis, and ameloblastoma.

By analyzing where the shared mutations were in relation to the whole tumor, the researchers were able to trace the origins of certain subtypes of cancer cells back to what they called key "driver mutations."

It is difficult to determine driver mutations from DNA sequence alone; but drivers tend to be the most commonly shared mutations amongst tumors, cluster around known oncogenes, and are tend to be non-silent.