Genetic profiling prostate cancer – Lessons from Africa

International Conference on Prostate Cancer

June 22-24, 2015 Florida, USA

Vanessa M Hayes

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Cancer Sci Ther

Abstract :

Prostate cancer is a genetic disease, with a family history of prostate cancer a significant risk factor. Besides increased age, the only other notable risk factor has been associated with an African-ancestry. Specifically, African-American men are 1.6 times more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer and 2.4 times more likely to die as a result of prostate cancer than European-Americans. However, this striking disparity has as yet not been fully investigated outside the context of the United States. Initiated in 2008, the Southern African Prostate Cancer Study (SAPCS) is a unique ongoing resource to investigate clinical presentation, epidemiological and genetic risk factors, as well as associated disease progression within Black South Africans. Enrolling over 1300 men to date and compared with African-Americans, we report significantly aggressive prostate cancer defined by pathological Gleason score >7 (17% and 36%, respectively) and biochemical PSAâ?¥20mg/L (17.2% and 83.2%, respectively)- prostate cancer is therefore a major public health concern for Black South Africans. Investigating 24 demographic and lifestyle measures, we show significant prostate cancer risk associations with a number of known factors, including additional within subpopulation ethnolinguistic classification (p=0.0046). The latter further expands on the genetic-basis hypothesis. Not surprisingly though, we show no evidence for risk prediction for published, largely European-defined, genome-wide association study identified prostate cancer risk alleles (n=46). We have more recently investiagated a link to maternal inheritance and prostate cancer risk and disease outcomes within the SAPCS. We demonstrate an increased risk associated with the earliest diverged (genetically distinct) mitochondrial haplogroups, while we identify a correlation between the cumulative mutational frequency and number of somatic mitochondrial DNA mutations with aggressive prostate cancer. In conclusions, our African derived cohort is not only providing an alternative for the African-American studies, but is shedding light into the significance of both inherited and acquired genetic events driving African-ancestral prostate cancer risk and adverse disease outcomes.