According to researchers in Holland, the BRAC2 gene mutation, which has been linked to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers, has now been found to raise quite markedly the risk of pancreatic and prostate cancers in men.
The Dutch researchers who conducted the study also suggest that there might be a connection between the mutated gene and an increased risk of bone and throat cancers.
Apparently the researchers found that carriers of the mutated gene were seven times more likely to have pharyngeal cancer and eight times more likely to have pancreatic cancer than the general population.
It also appeared that male carriers were more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer.
The researchers say that as almost half of the men with prostate cancer had died, early and radical treatment should be offered to men carrying the mutated gene rather than the current practice of simply watching and waiting.
The research is published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
jme.bmjjournals/
Since each gene can interact with many others in complex patterns, the researchers turned to a database of information on thousands of human, mouse and rats genes, compiled from more than 200,000 scientific articles with technology developed by Ingenuity Systems Inc. Using that tool they were able to construct inflammation-associated molecular networks involving interactions between more than 8,000 genes. Hundreds of these genes and pathways were not previously known to be associated with the inflammatory process.
"Not only has this work identified novel pathways of inflammation, it also demonstrates an approach to getting more meaning out of the data provided by microarray gene expression profiles. We're hoping to determine what tools are going to be most effective in producing real knowledge from these lists of perturbed genes," says Tompkins, who is the John Francis Burke Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.
"This work represents a major step in understanding inflammation in severely injured or burned patients. We hope this knowledge eventually will help physicians better predict patient outcomes and tailor treatments accordingly," said Jeremy M. Berg, PhD, director of the NIGMS, one of the National Institutes of Health.
The senior authors of the Nature paper are Stephen Lowry, MD, chair of Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS), and Ronald Davis, PhD, professor of Biochemistry and Genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC). The lead authors are Steve Calvano, PhD, RWJMS, and Wenzhong Xiao, PhD, SGTC; co-authors are Daniel Richards, Ramon Felciano, PhD, Raymond Cho, and Richard Chen of Ingenuity Systems Inc.; Henry Baker, PhD, Kevin Tschoeke, MD, and Lyle Moldawer, PhD, University of Florida; Bernard Brownstein, PhD, and Perren Cobb, MD, Washington University School of Medicine; Carol Miller-Graziano, PhD, University of Rochester School of Medicine; and Michael Mindrinos, PhD, SGTC.
mgh.harvard/