Cancer tumours manipulate a natural cell process to promote their survival, and controlling this mechanism could stop progress of the deadly disease. <br/><br/>Oxford Scientists said, non-sense mediated decay, NMD, is a natural physiological process that provides cells with the ability to detect DNA errors called nonsense mutations.<br/><br/>It also enables these cells to eliminate the mutated message that comes from these faulty genes, before they can be translated into proteins that can cause disease formation.<br/>NMD is known among the medical community for the role it plays in the development of genetic diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis and some hereditary forms of cancers.<br/><br/>Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham in the UK developed a computer algorithm to mine DNA sequences from cancer to accurately predict whether or not an NMD would eliminate genes that had nonsense mutations. <br/><br/>The work originally focused on ovarian cancers, and found that about a fifth of these cancers use NMD, to become stronger. Following the ovarian cancer analysis, the team expanded the study to include other cancer types. They analysed about a million different cell mutations in more than 7,000 tumours from the Cancer Genome Atlas covering 24 types of cancer.