PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
21-Aug-2014
Contact: Glenna Picton picton@bcm.edu 713-798-7973 Baylor College of Medicine
HOUSTON (Aug. 21, 2014) An international scientific collaboration led by Baylor College of Medicine has revealed clues about genetic alterations that may contribute to a rare form of kidney cancer, providing new insights not only into this rare cancer but other types as well.
The collaboration, a project of the National Institutes of Health's Cancer Genome Atlas initiative, completed the sequence of chromophobe renal cell carcinoma and published the results today in the journal Cancer Cell.
"The Cancer Genome Atlas is a federally funded national effort that has already completed the sequence of many major types of cancer (breast, lung, ovarian, for example), but this project is now branching out to sequence more rare types of cancer," said Dr. Chad Creighton, associate professor of medicine and a biostatistician in the NCI-designated Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor and the lead and corresponding author on the report. "The idea is that with a better understanding of these more rare types of cancers, we gain new insight that might be relevant to how we study other types of cancer. The findings in this study are a perfect example of that."
Chromophobe renal cell carcinoma is a rare type of kidney cancer, with approximately 2,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States. A majority of patients survive the disease.
Clinical impact
"Although most patients are reassured when the pathology of their kidney tumor comes back as chromophobe, we all have cared for patients who developed and died from metastatic chromophobe kidney cancers," said Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, associate professor of hematology and oncology in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-senior author on the study. "This report is incredibly exciting for physicians who care for these patients because all of the treatment plans we have had to this point have been based on the biology of the more common kidney cancer type, as if chromophobe must be a close relative of that disease."
The project shows with no uncertainty that chromophobe renal cell carcinoma represents a distinct cancer entity, and reveals exciting biology inherent to the disease that we hope in the future will allow new therapies to be developed specifically for the chromophobe type of kidney cancer, Rathmell said.
See more here:
Sequence of rare kidney cancer reveals unique alterations involving telomerase