In the 1970s, epidemiologists found that workers in factories using vinyl chloride, the key ingredient for PVC plastics, had unusually high rates of a rare form of liver cancer called angiosarcoma.
Biologists later identified a mutation that appears to be associated with this cancer, which originates in cells of the blood vessels that feed the liver. Now, using new sequencing technology that enables large-scale analysis of DNA damage-associated mutations, MIT researchers have pinpointed the specific type of DNA damage that may be responsible for this mutation.