Ohio researchers ID gene related to lung cancer
A gene identified by University of Cincinnati researchers could be used to identify people at high risk for developing lung cancer.
Smokers with the gene could be directed toward earlier, more aggressive lung cancer checks, said Marshall Anderson, the cancer biologist who led the study, while younger people with the gene could be discouraged from smoking in the first place.
Discovering the gene, dubbed RGS17, “could change clinical diagnosis and treatment as radically as the discovery of the breast cancer genes did,” Anderson said. “A proven genetic test could help us identify people at risk before the disease progresses.”
Anderson has led the multi-institutional Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium since 1997.
Tobacco smoke is the primary environmental cause for lung cancer, but science has shown there’s a strong genetic component as well, Anderson said. Less than a fifth of heavy smokers develop lung cancer, he said.
For the study, researchers have followed more than 100 families from six sites around the United States. Every family had at least five members from multiple generations with lung cancers.
“This gene is clearly interactive with cigarette smoke exposure,” he said. “In the families we’ve identified with the gene, we’ve impressed on them that if you don’t smoke, the risk factor for developing lung cancer goes down by probably a factor of 10. In some of these families, we’ve seen the younger generations of people stop smoking.”
In 2004, Anderson and his team reported the first genetic evidence of a major cluster of about 100 genes linked to lung cancer susceptibility.
In follow-up studies, researchers found that when RGS17 was suppressed in genetically altered mice, lung cancer tumors shrank, proving that the gene must be present for cancer development and growth.
The gene is also found in about half of what doctors call “sporadic” lung cancer tumors, in which patients have no known risk factors for developing the disease.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer related disease and death, according to the American Cancer Society. It kills more than 160,000 Americans a year.
Part of the problem with lung cancer is that by the time doctors find it, it’s often so advanced that surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are ineffective.
One challenge he and his colleagues faced for the current study, published in the current issue of “Clinical Cancer Research,” was finding living lung cancer patients who could provide tissue and genetic samples.
Identifying people with the gene who smoke could encourage those folks to get screened earlier and more aggressively for signs of lung cancer, and get them necessary treatment earlier, Anderson said.
