Long-term exposure to cigarette smoke may do more than damage DNA. A new Johns Hopkins laboratory study suggests it reprograms lung stem cells, the cells that maintain and repair lung tissue, in ways that leave them vulnerable to specific cancer-causing gene changes and help determine which type of lung cancer develops.
The findings, announced by Johns Hopkins Medicine and published October 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from lab-grown tissue and mice. The study does not show that the same process happens in people. Still, it offers clues about how smoking, chemical changes to genes, and mutations may work together in the earliest stages of non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer.
