A team of scientists have discover that air pollution can trigger lung cancer in people who have never smoked because fine particles in polluted air may promote changes in cells in the airways and cause inflammation in the lungs. They analysed data about PM2.5 exposure and lung cancer in 400,000 people from the UK, Taiwan and South Korean, and carried out laboratory experiments with mice, human cells and tissues.
The findings, based on research led by the Francis Crick Institute in London and funded by Cancer Research UK, were released at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Paris on Saturday 10 September.
Tobacco smoke and ultraviolet light are two important environmental carcinogens that damage DNA and create mutations that generate tumours.
«The mechanism we’ve identified could ultimately help us to find better ways to prevent and treat lung cancer in never smokers,» said the project leader Charles Swanton, professor of personalised cancer medicine at University College London. «The next step is to discover why some lung cells with mutations become cancerous when exposed to pollutants while others don’t.»
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