Norman Swan

for these mutations that have happened to the child and causing cancer.

And one of the reasons they do that is to try and find out whether or not there are unusual mutations which might guide the treatment, but they don't go hunting and fishing across the whole genome, across the germline.

Anyway, this study, which is a massive study involving a lot of different authors,

looked at what happens if you were to do germline testing.

In other words, look at the whole genome in children with cancer.

What do you find?

And does it make a difference?

And what they found was it does make a difference.

And in some kids, quite a lot.

And it makes a big difference to families.

And the researcher I spoke to as the lead author on this paper is Noemi Rosenthal.

Fuentes Bolaños, who is a paediatric oncologist and clinical scientist at the Children's Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children's Hospital.

And what are these poor prognosis cancers?

So you went looking much more broadly and in an unbiased way to see what else was going on in the genome.

Correct.

What did you find?

How much higher does it go?

What oncologists talk about are actionable genes.

Correct.

So genes that actually make a difference.