A global group has just completed a comprehensive dataset of all cancer genomes, which will greatly improve diagnosis and treatment. The discoveries were published today in 23 papers by the Nature journal group as the Pan-Cancer Project, or officially, the IICGC-TCGA Pan-Caneer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project.

More than 1300 researchers and medics from 37 countries analyzed over 2,600 genomes of 38 different types of tumor over the past 6 years. Using the collected data, 16 working groups examined how cancers grow. They added new knowledge about the biology of tumors, identifying the diverse multiple molecular processes that lead to cancer-causing mutations. The Pan-Cancer Project also improved and developed new methods for analyzing cancer genomes.

Until now genomic studies focused only on the 1% of the genome that codes for proteins, or the exome. The Pan-Cancer Project examined the other 99% of the genome, above all areas which regulate gene activity.

“This large international effort shows the breadth of the types of research and new biological insight that are possible using whole cancer genome data,” said Gad Getz, an institute member and director of the Cancer Genome Computational Analysis Group at the Broad Institute and also director of bioinformatics at the Mass General Hospital’s Cancer Center and a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. He was the senior author of three of the papers and was a member of the steering committee (HMS). Other institutions on the steering committee include the Ontario (Canada) Institute for Cancer Research, Britain's Wellcome Sanger Institute, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany, and UC Santa Cruz.

Amidst today's pile-up of end-year results, including lots of Nordics and telcos, I have a stock for the Pan-Cancer Project, but only for paid subscribers, because it is still an obscure small-cap. Subscribe to get this stock's name and ticker symbol. I will also publish this information for free exclusively here on TalkMarkets later in the week.  Follow me on TalkMarkets to be notified once this information is published.