News

This is an excerpt of a story that appeared in The Washington Post. Read the full article here. 

Team approach: Drs. Mark Rubin, Andrea Sboner, Himisha Beltran and Olivier Elemento Leading American and British cancer researchers are urging that all men with advanced prostate cancer strongly consider being tested for inherited gene mutations -- both to help steer their treatment and to alert family members who themselves might be at increased risk for a range of cancers.

This new recommendation, which represents a major change in approach, was prompted by a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found that almost 12 percent of men with advanced cancer had defects in genes that are designed to fix damage to DNA, compared to 4.6 percent of patients with disease that hadn't spread.

The study involved almost 700 men in the United States and Britain. Researchers looked for mutations in well-known DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are typically linked to breast and ovarian cancers, as well as in more obscure genes called CHEK2 and ATM. The most common defects involved the BRCA2 gene. The frequency of the mutations did not differ significantly based on age or family history of prostate cancer.

"The study has a simple message," said senior co-author Kenneth Offit, who is chief of the Clinical Genetics Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. "Those individuals with advanced prostate cancer should consider getting genetic testing, regardless of family history."

Currently, only men with a family history of prostate cancer are offered such testing; insurers are unlikely to cover it for other patients. But based on the results of the study, Offit and other researchers said they will press for a change in clinical guidelines. Should that occur, much wider reimbursement would likely follow.

Knowing a patient has a DNA-repair-gene mutation could be critically important in deciding which treatment to use, said senior co-author Peter Nelson, a member of the Human Biology, Clinical Research and Public Health Sciences divisions at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

A new class of drugs called PARP inhibitors, which is being used for women with BRCA-related ovarian cancer, is showing promise against advanced prostate cancer in clinical trials and may be the first targeted therapy approved for that disease. Platinum-based chemotherapy, also used for ovarian cancer, could benefit these men, too, Nelson said.

The researchers stressed that genetic testing could be important to families as well. A high proportion of men with the genetic abnormality had close relatives with cancers other than prostate cancer compared with the study group that did not have a mutation. So a man aware that he has an inherited mutation could serve as a "sentinel" for relatives who might share the same defect, prompting them to learn their genetic status. A woman whose brother knows of his own BRCA mutation, for example, might decide to get tested and, if the result is positive, have preventive surgery or take other steps to reduce her risk of ovarian cancer.

"You have the opportunity to prevent ovarian cancer in the family of a man with prostate cancer," Offit said. "This is a very remarkable."

Meyer Cancer Center researchers involved in the study included Himisha Beltran, M.D., Mark Rubin, M.D., and Olivier Elemento, Ph.D. 

Other institutions involved in the study were the University of Washington School of Medicine, University of Michigan, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

The research was funded in part by Stand Up To Cancer, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.