GENE HUNTERS have launched an all-out search for genes that increase a man's risk of developing prostate cancer.
If all goes as planned, a genome-wide scan for specific chromosome regions where such putative genes reside will be completed by the end of this year, says Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR), in Bethesda, Md. Collins described 1 such effort, a collaboration by researchers at NCHGR and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Md, at a General Motors Cancer Research Foundation conference held in Bethesda.
The NCHGR-Hopkins team is 1 of several groups of investigators racing to find genes thought to confer hereditary susceptibility to prostate cancer, including investigators in the United States, Canada, and Europe. As with BRCA1 and BRCA2, the genes that underlie familial cases of breast cancer, the discovery of analogous gene mutations for prostate cancer would open up exciting