Tyler Seibert, MD, Ph.D. Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and radiation oncologist at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health speaks about Genetic Tool Improves Estimation of Prostate Cancer Risk in Diverse Ethnic/Racial Groups.
Link to Article –
https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-02-23-genetic-tool-improves-estimation-of-prostate-cancer-risk-in-diverse-ethnic-racial-groups.aspx
Link to Study –
https://rdcu.be/cfGMF
An international team led by scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine has validated a more inclusive and systematic genetic method for predicting the age of onset of advanced prostate cancer, a disease that could kill over 33,000 men in the United States by 2020.
The researchers identify the success of a polygenic hazard score (PHS) — a statistical calculation of an individual’s age-specific genetic risk for developing a disease — in a multi-ethnic patient population in the online edition of Nature Communications on February 23, 2021.
A multi-ethnic dataset of 80,491 men was used to test the genetic score established at UC San Diego, and it was found to be correlated with the age of onset of prostate cancer as well as the age of death from prostate cancer. According to the scientists, the PHS performed well in men of European, Asian, and African genetic ancestry.
According to Seibert, however, there was a significant difference between men of African and European ancestry. He believes this is due to the fact that men of African descent were excluded from the invention of the genetic method.
Seibert and a team of researchers, including Roshan Karunamuni, Ph.D., assistant project scientist at UC San Diego School of Medicine, identified genetic markers for prostate cancer risk that may be particularly useful in men of African ancestry, in a study published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2020.
According to Minh-Phuong Huynh-Le, MD, who is the first author of the Nature Communications paper and was a resident physician at UC San Diego Health during the research, adding these new genetic markers to the PHS enhanced efficiency in identifying men of African ancestry at the highest risk of prostate cancer and made the findings more comparable to those of the other ancestry groups. Huynh-Le is now an assistant professor in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at George Washington University.
Although the PHS has strengthened risk stratification, Seibert believes that more can be achieved. Most of the data actually used in analysis is also lacking in diversity. Researchers noticed that most men of African genetic heritage lacked clinical diagnosis knowledge, which was used to assess disease aggressiveness, even in the data for this report.