Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Helsinki in Finland have shown that the ‘switches’ that regulate the expression of genes play a major role in the development of cancer. In a study, published in Science, they investigated a gene region that contains a particular single nucleotide variant associated with increased risk for developing colorectal and prostate cancers – and found that removing this region caused dramatic resistance to tumor formation.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/10/31/science.1228606