What's New
Featured Articles and Studies
Alkes Price and Gaurav Bhatia were interviewed for an article on the main HSPH website regarding their new paper, "Genome-wide comparison of African-Ancestry Populations from CARe and Other Cohorts Reveals Signals of Natural Selection" (AJHG Sep 2011). Click here to read the full article!
Congratulations to Fengju Song and Mingfeng Zhang, who have been selected for press releases from the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, 2011. Both work with Dr. Jiali Han.
Coffee Consumption Associated With Decreased Risk for Basal Cell Carcinoma
Increased Tanning Bed Use Increases Risk for Deadly Skin Cancers
Dr. Han and his research group have had their work on tanning beds and skin cancer highlighted in several recent news articles:
MSNBC: Tanning Beds and Skin Cancer
Journal of Clinical Oncology Editorial Commentary: Public Health and the Tanning Bed Controversy
BPC3 Meeting at HSPH
PMAGE Director David Hunter and Deputy Director Peter Kraft are hosting the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) annual meeting at HSPH in October. The BPC3 was initiated in 2003 and funded for four years, with the aim to bring together large prospective cohort studies with more than 500 cases of breast cancer available for analysis. It includes nested case-control studies of breast and prostate cancer from eleven cohorts, and along with the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) forms a key component of the breast cancer epidemiology project of the NCI post-GWAS initiative. In 2003, the BPC3 conducted one of the first large-scale, pathway-based candidate gene studies: a comprehensive study of the relationship between common genetic variation in steroid hormone and insulin-like growth factor pathways and risk of these two cancers. The BPC3 was funded in 2007 to conduct genome-wide association studies of aggressive prostate cancer and estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer. This work has led to two published papers identifying novel variants associated with prostate and breast cancer. These GWAS are also contributing to other collaborative meta-analyses, such as NCI Post-GWAS projects for breast and prostate cancer and the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study.
ASHG 2011
Congratulations to the several PMAGE students, postdocs, and professors who have been selected to give talks and poster presentations at this year's ASHG conference in Montreal, Canada. The conference is from October 11-14th, 2011. Special congrats to Gaurav Bhatia and Noah Zaitlen, who were both selected for a 2011 ASHG Trainee Research Semifinalist Award. To see details about PMAGE members' presentations, please click here.
Awards
Mingfeng Zhang, who works with Jiali Han, has been selected to receive a Molecular Epidemiology Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) (MEG) Scholar-In-Training Award for the AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011, in Orlando, FL, USA, April 2-6, 2011. The MEG supports only three awards for the most meritorious proffered papers in molecular epidemiology! The title of her abstract is "Integrating Pathway Analysis amd Genetics of Gene Expression for Genome-wide Association Study of Basal Cell Carcinoma".
Highlighted Publications
High-percent mammographic density is one of the strongest risk factors for breast cancer. In an upcoming issue of Nature Genetics, PMAGE member Sara Lindstrom and colleagues report a meta-analysis of five genome-wide association studies for percent mammographic density. They identified an associated locus in ZNF365, which has also been associated with susceptibility to breast cancer. This study might provide insights into the previously unexplained link between genetic variation in ZNF365 and breast cancer. PMAGE members Aditi Hazra, David Hunter, and Peter Kraft, as well as HSPH member Rulla Tamimi, were also significant contributors to this study.
Nature Genetics Online http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n3/full/ng.760.html
Grants
Alkes Price was awarded R01 HG006399, "Methods for Genome-wide Association Studies in Admixed Populations." The goal of this project is to develop improved statistical methods for disease mapping in populations of mixed ancestry, fully accounting for chromosomal segments of distinct continental ancestry in these populations. Collaborators include David Reich (HMS), Nick Patterson (Broad Institute), and Simon Myers (University of Oxford).
Liming Liang is a co-investigator on RC4 MH092707, “Using GWAS Data for Enhanced Mendelian Randomization Studies.” This proposal capitalizes on genome-wide association data to improve Mendelian Randomization techniques, which have been proposed to draw unbiased causal inferences from observational data.
Peter Kraft was awarded U01HG005922-01 "Sequencing regions associated with breast cancer risk in European and African Americans." This project will sequence the regions spanning 10-15 common breast-cancer risk markers in 1,500 European-ancestry cases and 2,250 matched controls, as well as 500 African-American cases and 1000 matched controls. These data will provide substantive insight into the genetics of breast cancer, as well as guidance on the best design and analytic strategies for future sequencing studies. Liming Liang from PMAGE will provide key methodological support. Other collaborators include Xihong Lin and Alkes Price from HSPH; Shamil Sunyaev from HMS; and Chris Haiman, Dan Stram and Gary Chen from the University of Southern California.
David Hunter and Peter Kraft were among the Principal Investigators awarded U19CA148065-02, "Discovery, Biology and Risk of Inherited Variants in Breast Cancer." This is a multi-project, multi -center project supported by the National Cancer Institute's Transdisciplinary Cancer Genomics Initiative (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-CA-09-002.html). Dr. Hunter is the overall coordinating PI. Dr. Kraft is the coordinating PI for Project 3, which aims to understand the interplay between breast-cancer risk markers and modifiable risk factors and explore the utility of these markers for risk prediction and cancer prevention. The other projects will conduct a meta-analysis of existing breast-cancer genome-wide association studies to identify new markers (Doug Easton, co-ordinating PI) and study the biological mechanisms behind these markers (John Quackenbush, co-ordinating PI) . Collaborators include PMAGE member Aditi Hazra; Rulla Tamimi from HSPH; and Matt Freedman from HMS.
