Researchers discover new gene fusions in prostate cancer

Michigan, United States, January 12: Researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) Comprehensive Cancerdefine Center have discovered several gene fusions that might one day serve as a marker for detecting cancer.

The researchers have identified a series of gene fusions among which some gene fusions were seen in multiple cell lines studied while others appeared only once. The fusions were found only in cancerdefine cells, and not in normal cells.

The gene fusions occur when their chromosomes exchange places; the recurrent gene fusions are thought to be the driving mechanism that causes certain cancers to develop.

"We defined a new class of mutations in prostate cancerdefine. The recurrent fusions are thought to be the driving mechanism of cancer. But we found other fusions as well, some of which were unique to individual patients. Our next step is to understand if these play a role in driving disease," says the lead researcher, Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and S.P. Hicks, endowed professor of pathology at the U-M Medical School.

With the help of sequencing machines, the researchers used gene sequencing technique (which involves creating a library of all RNAs in a cell) to identify gene fusions. These machines run 24 hours a day for days at a time, reading the RNA. Once the sequencing is completed, researchers study the data searching for the gene fusions.

In the study, the researchers in addition to verifying the known gene fusions, found new gene fusions that were common among some tumor samples. Additional gene fusions were identified in individual tumor samples. This study focused on prostate cancer but Chinnaiyan’s team is also looking for possible gene fusions involved in breast cancer, lung cancer and skin cancer.

The study was published in the online edition of the journal Nature.