In a study to be published on-line in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of May 30, 2005, they show, for the first time, that exposure to a pharmaceutical estrogen during fetal development can permanently "reprogram" tissue in a way that determines whether tumors will develop in adulthood.

While the study was conducted with rats that are susceptible to benign uterine tumors, and the compound used was diethylstilbestrol (DES), a banned estrogenic anti-miscarriage drug, the researchers say their conclusions likely have relevance for humans who inherit defective tumor suppressor genes that make them susceptible to a number of different cancers.

It could explain, for example, why some women who inherited BRCA1/2 gene defects develop breast cancer as adults while other women with the same genes remain disease-free, they say.

"The kind of developmental reprogramming we see from this work could represent an important determinate of risk in people genetically susceptible to hormone-dependent tumors, such as uterine, breast and prostate cancer," says the study's principal investigator, Cheryl Walker, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Carcinogenesis.

"It suggests that for gene-environmental interactions, the timing of the exposure may be critical, and it may happen much earlier than anyone ever suspected," she says.

While more work is needed to make the case that human cancer results in the same way, "we need to open our eyes to the notion that cancer that develops in adults may have been put in motion before a person is born," says the first author, Jennifer Cook, a graduate student who works with Walker at M. D. Anderson's Sc
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Contact: Nancy Jensen
nwjensen@mdanderson.org
713-792-0655
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
30-May-2005