The amount of DNA damage caused by certain chemotherapies used to effectively treat childhood cancer has been revealed, along with a hidden impact on the liver, paving the way for future research into new ways to mitigate these effects.

Platinum-based chemotherapy drugs are powerful at treating cancer but can have an underappreciated impact on the rest of the body. To investigate this, a team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge, the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London used new sequencing technologies and found distinctive DNA damage in the liver. They suggest that further research could lead to new ways to protect against this.

Published in Science, the researchers also discovered that while effectively destroying cancer cells, chemotherapy can “age” a child’s healthy cells. This results in children’s healthy cells having the same number of DNA changes that adult cells gain over many decades.