A new discovery in ovarian cancer may help improve early diagnosis of the disease.
In about 15 per cent of serous ovarian cancer tumours, a certain gene is broken and fused to a nearby gene, in so-called gene fusion.
It was identified by Dr Patrick Brown of Stanford University, California, USA. His team carried out extensive sequencing of the genes involved in ovarian cancer. They found that a gene closely related to the oestrogen receptor called ESRRA fuses to a gene called C11orf20 via chromosome rearrangement.
Next, the gene fusion was independently confirmed by teams at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle and the British Columbia Cancer Research Agency.
This finding may provide insight into how ovarian cancers develop, giving a new direction for future research. It may also act as a marker for detecting the cancer at an earlier, curable stage.
Using a similar approach, future studies can look for other genes that are important in ovarian cancer, especially as much of the gene sequencing data has been made public.
Dr Brown said: "More study will reveal if this gene fusion contributes to the tumour’s aggressive growth and spread. We are testing our algorithms on publicly available data and hope it might lead to more discoveries.
"Although this is the first time that a rearrangement of neighbouring genes has been found to occur repeatedly in a cancer, we suspect that these local rearrangements may be more common and important than we had realised."
The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology. "Gene fusions involving adjacent or nearby genes can readily escape detection but may play important roles in the development and progression of cancer," the authors conclude.
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