Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center say they have preliminary evidence in laboratory-grown, human airway cells that a condensed form of cigarette smoke triggers so-called "epigenetic" changes in the cells consistent with the earliest steps toward lung cancer development. Epigenetic processes are essentially switches that control a gene's potentially heritable levels of protein production but without involving changes to underlying structure of a gene's DNA. One example of such an epigenetic change is methylation -- when cells add tiny methyl chemical groups to a beginning region of a gene's DNA sequence, often silencing the gene's activation. "Our study suggests that epigenetic changes to cells treated with cigarette smoke sensitize airway cells to genetic mutations known to cause lung cancers," says Stephen Baylin, MD, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Details of the scientists' experiments are described in the September 11, 2017 issue of Cancer Cell. The article is titled “Chronic Cigarette Smoke-Induced Epigenomic Changes Precede Sensitization of Bronchial Epithelial Cells to Single-Step Transformation by KRAS Mutations.”Login Or Register To Read Full Story