Seattle Researchers Zero In On Location Of Gene For Inherited Prostate Cancer; Gene Also Linked To Br...( Significant research findings from ...)

Significant research findings from Michael Milken's CaP CURE funding

SEATTLE - Scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington have mapped the region of a gene associated with prostate cancer that runs in families. The gene also may trigger an inherited susceptibility to primary brain cancer.

The study results appear in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The researchers, who worked three and a half years to map the gene, have named it CAPB, short for "cancer of the prostate and brain." The gene is located on the short arm of chromosome 1 in a region called 1p36.

"Finding genes such as CAPB may provide clues that will eventually help diagnose, treat, cure and even prevent prostate cancer," says senior author Dr. Elaine Ostrander, head of the Genetics Program at the Hutchinson Center and a UW affiliate professor of molecular biotechnology and zoology.

Dr. Janet Stanford, an epidemiologist at the Hutchinson Center and at UW, oversaw recruitment of the 141 families nationwide involved in the Prostate Cancer Genetic Study, or PROGRESS.

"None of this work would have been possible without the participation of these families," says Stanford, a member of the Hutchinson Center's Division of Public Health Sciences and UW research professor of epidemiology. Families enrolled in PROGRESS included those with three or more first-degree relatives with prostate cancer, three or more generations affected by prostate cancer and/or two first-degree relatives diagnosed with prostate cancer by age 60.

Participants included men with and without prostate cancer and selected women, all of whom were asked to fill out questionnaires and donate blood samples for DNA analysis.

Of each family that participated, blood samples were taken from an average of three to four men with prostate cancer. At least a dozen of the families had confirmed cases of both prostate and primary brain cancers. Several pr
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Contact: Kristen Woodward
kwoodwar@fhcrc.org
206-667-5095
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
11-Mar-1999