Biomarkers and Prostate Cancer Progression

Extract

An international team of researchers believe they may have found, if not the smoking gun, at least a few DNA “bullets” that determine whether prostate cancer will become aggressive.

A new biomarker study, which appeared in the Aug. 16, 2011, online edition of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention, identified five inherited genetic variants associated with aggressive prostate cancer. The five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were located in five genes—one each—that may affect prostate cancer progression, according to the study’s authors, who say this study is the first population-based study to show that germline genetic variants predict prostate cancer–specific survival.

The researchers focused on markers that could offer prognostic information after diagnosis. “Our goal was to identify a panel of markers that are easily measured from the man’s genetic background that would indicate the likelihood that he’s going to have an aggressive course of his disease or not,” said study co-author Janet L. Stanford, Ph.D., co-director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Program in Prostate Cancer Research and a member of its Public Health Sciences Division. “This could help those men and their physicians better manage that prostate cancer and guide their treatment recommendation.”