Dr Matta said, We're developing new technology that would make measuring DNA repair capacity more inexpensive, faster and easier to do. This would give a boost to their plan to use DNA repair capacity as a marker for breast cancer risk, similar to how cholesterol levels are used as a marker to predict risk for heart disease.

Understanding the cancer mutations will go a long way in fighting them. That is why Rick Wilson and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis have been studying the four DNA samples from a 44 year old woman who died of breast cancer with a year of being diagnosed. This patient was the first African American woman to have her entire genome sequenced. She had triple negative cancer which was negative for estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER-2. Researchers found 50 separate mutations in her DNA samples of which 20 helped to spread the cancer.