Nature Communication: New genetic diagnostic technology helps predict the risk of prostate cancer in a multi-ethnic population

Nature Communication: New genetic diagnostic technology helps predict the risk of prostate cancer in a multi-ethnic population.  Based on previous research, an international team led by scientists from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine has verified a more inclusive and comprehensive genetic tool. It can predict the age of onset of malignant prostate cancer, which caused the death of more than 33,000 American male patients between 2004 and 2020.

In a report in the online edition of the journal Nature Communication on February 23, 2021, researchers described the performance of the polygenic risk score (PHS) in multi-ethnic patients-a mathematical estimation of the genetic risk of disease at a specific age .

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“This genetic tool may allow us to target cancer screening efforts to men most likely to need it. We are addressing a major public health problem while addressing genomics and genetic testing for people of non-European descent in most studies. It’s a serious shortage of proportion.”

In a multi-ethnic data composed of 80,491 men, the author concentrated on testing the genetic scoring standard established by the University of California, San Diego, and the results showed that the score was related to the age of onset of prostate cancer and the age of death from prostate cancer. According to the author, PHS has shown outstanding performance among men of European, Asian and African genetic ancestry.

However, according to the author of the article Sabert, there is a clear gap between African and European descent. He said that the most likely reason is that the development of genetic tools does not include people of African descent.

In a study published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2020, Sabort and researchers including Dr. Roshan Karunamuni, an assistant project scientist at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, determined that the genetic markers of prostate cancer risk may be of African descent Especially useful among people.

Dr. Minh-Phuong Huynh-Le said that adding these new genetic markers to PHS can improve the ability to identify men of African ancestry at the highest risk of prostate cancer and make the results more comparable to human genes of other ancestry.

Huynh-Le said: “You can estimate a man’s genetic risk of prostate cancer based on blood or saliva samples. Prostate cancer screening can reduce morbidity and mortality, but it should be more targeted and personalized. Those with higher People with genetic risk may benefit from earlier and/or more frequent prostate cancer screening.”

Sabert said that although PHS has improved risk stratification, more needs to be done. Many data currently used for research still lack diverse representations. Even in the data from this study, the researchers pointed out that most African genetic families lack clinical diagnostic information to determine the aggressiveness of the disease.

(source:internet, reference only)

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