Researchers in Utah and Canada, working together, have identified a gene that puts men at high risk for developing prostate cancer. And they say it is the first step to providing a screening test and perhaps even preventing the disease.
The study by researchers at Myriad Genetics, the University of Utah School of Medicine and LDS Hospital, as well as two universities in Canada, was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Genetics.
Scientists believe that several things, including age, high-fat diet and family history, are probably responsible for the development of prostate cancer. These researchers also believe that other genes that increase risk to varying degrees may be identified in the next decade.
The American Cancer Society estimates 198,100 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year. And 31,500 men will die in that time from the disease.
Scientists believe that genes carrying strong predisposition to the disease may be responsible for 5 percent to 10 percent of all prostate cancers. Genes that pose a moderate risk might account for up to 40 percent of all cases.
The gene, called both ELAC 2 and HPC2, is the first to be proven to place men at high risk for prostate cancer. The discovery was first announced in October at the meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Philadelphia.
University researchers first started looking for familial links in prostate cancer in the 1980s, according to Lisa Cannon-Albright, a U. genetic epidemiologist and co-author of the study. In 1990, researchers sampled their first high-risk family and since have studied hundreds of families and thousands of affected men, she said. To identify the families, they used the state cancer registry and the Utah Population Database, then collected blood samples from volunteers in those families.
Myriad Genetics extracted DNA from the blood samples and narrowed down the region where the suspected gene would be found, according to company spokesman William Hockett — in this case, on Chromosome 17. Myriad licensed the therapeutic rights to pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough, one of the study's sponsors, and retained for itself the right to develop a predictive test.
"This is an important cancer gene," Hockett said. "There may be others found, but we think this has the basis of a susceptibility test, and we'll be introducing such a test later this year. It may require supplementation with other genes to be a powerful test and if so, we'll do that."
Cannon-Albright said U. researchers hope to find and understand predisposition genes for a variety of common diseases. "Because we're in Utah and we have genealogy resources and an extremely collaborative population that's well-educated and willing to participate, we can accomplish that. This is a big, big, big one that means a lot to us."
The discovery "appears to explain both familial and non-familial cases," Cannon-Albright said, adding that the gene was found in a lot of different organisms, "all the way down to yeast. That speaks to its significance, though it doesn't tell us what it is."
Researchers studied 33 Utah families with high rates of prostate cancer to locate the gene on chromosome 17, then expanded the research to 127 high-risk Utah families to identify the specific gene as ELAC2.
Men who carry one of the two high-risk ELAC2 mutations are as much as 10 percent more likely to get prostate cancer than other men. Those with gene variants have up to a threefold increased risk.
The research team was led by Sean Tavtigian, vice president and cancer research director at Myriad Genetics; Cannon-Albright and molecular geneticist Susan Neuhausen of the U.'s medical infomatics department; Jacques Simard of Laval University in Quebec and Johanna Rommens of the University of Toronto. Cannon-Albright and another researcher are also affiliated with LDS Hospital. Sponsors included Endorecherche, the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and the state of Utah.
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com