Ancestral Heritage and Cancer, Two groundbreaking studies recently published in the journals Nature and Genome Medicine found genetic signatures that explain ethnic disparities in the severity of prostate cancer,
By genetically analyzing prostate cancer tumors from Australian, Brazilian, and South African donors, the team developed a new prostate cancer taxonomy (classification scheme) and cancer drivers that not only distinguish patients based on their genetic ancestry but also predict which cancers are likely to become life-threatening, a task that is currently difficult. “Our understanding of prostate cancer has been severely limited by a research focus on Western populations,” said senior author Professor Vanessa Hayes, genomicist and Petre Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health in Australia. “Being of African descent, or from Africa, more than doubles a man’s risk for lethal prostate cancer. Ancestral Heritage and Cancer, While genomics holds a critical key to unraveling contributing genetic and non-genetic factors, data for Africa has till now, been lacking.” “Prostate cancer is the silent killer in our region,” said University of Pretoria’s Professor Riana Bornman, an international expert in men’s health and clinical lead for the Southern African Prostate Cancer Study in South Africa. “We had to start with a grassroots approach, engaging communities with open discussion, establishing the infrastructure for African inclusion in the genomic revolution, while determining the true extent of prostate disease.”
Over two million cancer-specific genomic variants were identified in 183 untreated prostate tumors from males residing throughout the three research zones using advanced whole genome sequencing (a method of mapping the full genetic code of cancer cells). “Using cutting-edge computational data science which allowed for pattern recognition that included all types of cancer variants, Ancestral Heritage and Cancer, we revealed a novel prostate cancer taxonomy which we then linked to different disease outcomes,” said Dr. Weerachai Jaratlerdsiri, a computational biologist from the University of Sydney and first author on the Nature paper. “Combining our unique dataset with the largest public data source of European and Chinese cancer genomes allowed us to, for the first time, place the African prostate cancer genomic landscape into a global context.” As part of her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney, Dr. Tingting Gong, the first author of the Genome Medicine paper, painstakingly sifted through the genomic data for large changes in the structure of chromosomes (molecules that hold genetic information). These changes are often overlooked because of the complexity involved in computationally predicting their presence, but are an area of critical importance and contribution to prostate cancer.
Source: This news is originally published by scitechdaily