CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine share an exciting new discovery that could help them find a cure for cancer in the future.

Dr. Chongzhi Zang, of UVA's Cancer Center, has figured out how genes form and work during organ development.

It’s a discovery he says could give important insight into the growth of many types of cancer.

"Understanding the underlying mechanisms of how the gene mechanisms go wrong, we can understand how a normal healthy cell can go wrong and become a cancer cell,” said Zang.

He says catching abnormal cell changes early is the best bet for understanding cancer, and finding new therapeutic avenues to treat the disease effectively.

Specifically, the researchers learned more about how the digestive tract, lungs and liver form, changing from a "gut tube" into different organs.

Zang's team found that a particular genetic material called chromatin interacts with other factors, switching genes on and off, to help determine what cells become part of which organ.

They used a technology called "single-cell ATAC-seq" to create a sort of map of how the chromatin pattern changes inside a cell during organ formation in mice.

This discovery may fill in several gaps in how medicine understands the organ-development process in mammals, including people.

The researchers found that the way chromatin interacts with "transcription factors" changes in cells that will be parts of different organs, such as the liver or lungs.

This is a complex process and mistakes can have major consequences in the formation of an organ.

For example, a problem in the interaction forming the pancreas may result in it developing several cyst-like structures.

The researchers say that "cell fate" errors often occur in the early stages of pancreatic cancer, leading to the formation of precancerous lesions. Thus, an understanding of the organ-development process and what can go wrong may offer insights into the formation of certain cancerous tumors.

These findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.