In the process to finally unravel the mysteries of prostate cancer and even develop a blood test that can help doctors plan treatment options in the early stages, five new gene variants, or mutations have been linked to the aggressive and deadly disease. Meet LEPR, CRY1, RNASEL, IL4 and ARVCF.

For this particular study, scientists, always looking for genetic differences that could highlight risk differences, gathered blood samples from more than 1,300 prostate cancer patients living in the Seattle region. All were between the ages of 35 and 74 when diagnosed.

What they came up with were five single letter mutations (SNPs) that were isolated among the patients’ “DNA alphabet” as having a significant bearing on prostate cancer progression in terms of affecting cell death, tumor growth, inflammation, androgen hormone levels, blood-vessel development and bone density.

“Biomarkers that could distinguish between patients with indolent vs. more aggressive tumors are urgently needed. The panel of markers we’ve identified provides the first validated evidence that inherited genetic variants play a role in prostate cancer progression and mortality. Ultimately these markers could be used in the clinic, along with other known predictors that are used to assess tumor aggressiveness, such as a high Gleason score, to identify men with a high-risk profile.”

What are at the pinnacle of debate are the longstanding concerns about unnecessary over-treatment of many prostate cancer patients who actually face a relatively low risk for fast disease progression and death. Because treatment can bring about undesirable side effects, such as sexual impotence and urinary incontinence, an effort has been under way to achieve a more personalized assessment of a patient’s particular prognosis after diagnosis.

Stanford continues:

“The ability to distinguish patients at elevated risk for having aggressive, life threatening prostate cancer at the time of diagnosis could improve care for the subset of cases most likely to benefit from aggressive therapy and help avoid over-treatment of patients whose tumors are likely to remain indolent.”

William Phelps, program director of translational and preclinical cancer research at the American Cancer Society, said the push to develop more revealing diagnostic tools is driven by an acknowledgment that current treatment options can debilitate patients.

Phelps concludes:

“If the treatments we had for prostate cancer were very tolerable or very safe you would probably treat everybody. But the treatments we have available today are less than ideal. So certainly we can try to improve treatment. But at the same time we can also try to improve ways to identify patients who are more likely to progress rapidly from those likely to be very slow going, so we can reserve treatment for only those instances when it’s really necessary. If there are markers that better define the men whose cancer is most likely to progress, that would certainly prove very useful in the current climate.”

Written by Sy Kraft