From the BBC News:

Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers – skin and lung – a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.

Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team.

Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer.

The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth.

China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium scientists from the 10 countries involved say it will take them at least five years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete this mammoth task.

But once they have done this, patients will reap the benefits.

Professor Michael Stratton, who is the UK lead, said: “These catalogues are going to change the way we think about individual cancers.

“By identifying all the cancer genes we will be able to develop new drugs that target the specific mutated genes and work out which patients will benefit from these novel treatments.

[snip]

The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.

The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.

"But once they have done this, patients will reap the benefits." Could be, but certainly not in the short run. In 1956, Vernon Ingram and colleagues demonstrated that sickle cell disease was caused by substituting a glutamic acid residue with a valine residue in the beta chain of the hemoglobin molecule. This is now known to be a point mutation in the globin gene, a single error. So, for 53 years, we have known exactly what’s wrong in sickle cell anemia and that it is a single error. But we have been able to do nothing to cure the disease. Now think of diseases caused by tens of thousands of errors in who knows how many genes; i.e., the cancers mentioned above. If we cannot fix what’s wrong when we know a disease is caused by a single error, what are we going to do with a disease caused by thousands? Where even to start?

This is hype. Actually, super-hype. Irregularly, the media report that some gene has been identified that is linked to some disease and that the gene has been sequenced. Clinical result so far? Nada. The hype is telling us that knowing the tens of thousands of errors in the genome that are associated with certain cancers will lead to benefits for patients. That may be true in the very long run. But killing cancer stem cells may be a far more efficient solution. However, if your work is based on gene sequencing, then you want this kind of publicity. It helps pay for the mortgage.