Three common chemotherapy drugs cause DNA mutations. But a study on mice found that the mutations did not just occur in the animals that received the treatment, but also in their offspring.
This may mean that the genome in treated mice became destabilized, creating new mutations long after exposure to the drugs had ceased.
Nature reports:
“The work emphasizes the importance of looking at the effects of chemotherapy not only on recipients, but also on their descendants ... In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate the ‘bystander effect’, in which cells that do not directly receive radiation show signs of radiation-induced changes. It’s possible that some of these effects ... could contribute to the heritable genomic instability seen in response to radiation and, now, chemotherapy”.