Age-Specific Incidence Data Indicate Four Mutations Are Required for Human Testicular Cancers (original) (raw)
Related papers
A stratified genetic risk assessment for testicular cancer
International Journal of Andrology, 2011
Three genome-wide association studies of testicular cancer have uncovered predisposition alleles in or near KITLG, BAK1, SPRY4, TERT, ATF7IP and DMRT1. We investigated whether testicular cancer-risk alleles can be utilized in the clinical setting. We employed the receiver operating characteristic curves for genetic risk models to measure the discriminatory power of a risk variantbased risk model, and found that the newly discovered variants provided a discriminatory power of 69.2%. This suggested that about 69.2% of the time, a randomly selected patient with testicular cancer had a higher estimated risk than the risk for a randomly selected control subject. Using a multiplicative model, we estimated that white men in the top 1% of genetic risk as defined by eight risk variants had a relative risk that was 10.5-fold greater than that for the general white male population. This risk differential does not appear to be clinically useful, given the relative rarity and highly curable nature of testicular germ cell tumour (TGCT). In the authors' view, a stratified genetic risk assessment strategy might be useful, theoretically, for men who also have independent clinical risk factors for testicular cancer. Several established TGCT risk factors, such as cryptorchidism (RR = 4.8) and male infertility (SIR = 2.8) might prove useful in that context, but we currently do not know whether these testicular cancer-risk loci are associated with, or independent of, such clinical risk factors. More research is required before we can utilize testicular cancer-risk loci for clinically meaningful risk prediction.
Scientific reports, 2015
A sizable fraction of testicular germ cell tumour (TGCT) risk is expected to be explained by heritable factors. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully identified a number of common SNPs associated with TGCT. It is however, unclear how much common variation there is left to be accounted for by other, yet to be identified, common SNPs and what contribution common genetic variation makes to the heritable risk of TGCT. We approached this question using two complimentary analytical techniques. We undertook a population-based analysis of the Swedish family-cancer database, through which we estimated that the heritability of TGCT at 48.9% (CI:47.2%-52.3%). We also applied Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analysis to 922 cases and 4,842 controls to estimate the heritability of TGCT. The heritability explained by known common risk SNPs identified by GWAS was 9.1%, whereas the heritability explained by all common SNPs was 37.4% (CI:27.6%-47.2%). These complementary findings ...
European urology, 2018
Testicular germ cell tumour (TGCT), the most common cancer in young men, has a significant heritable basis that has long raised questions as to the existence of underlying major high-penetrance susceptibility gene(s). To determine the contribution of rare gene mutations to the inherited risk of TGCT, we analysed germline whole-exome data for 919 TGCT cases and 1609 cancer-free controls. We compared frequencies between TGCT cases and controls of rare (<1%) and low-frequency (1-5%) coding variants (1) individually and (2) collapsed at the gene level via burden testing (T1, disruptive; T2, all deleterious; and T3, all nonsynonymous) using Fisher's exact test with Bonferroni correction of significance thresholds. No individual variant or individual gene showed a significant association with TGCT after correction for multiple testing. In the largest whole-exome sequencing study of testicular cancer reported to date, our findings do not support the existence of a major high-penetra...
British journal of cancer, 2000
Testicular germ cell tumours (TGCTs) may arise through a process of multi-step carcinogenesis, and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at specific loci is likely to be an important early event, although this has not been studied in detail. In order to explore the pathogenetic relationships among TGCTs, we investigated the genetic changes in testicular tumours that exhibit a disease continuum through the precursor carcinoma in situ (CIS) to either seminoma (SE) and/or non-seminomatous germ cell tumour (NSGCT). Universal amplification has been performed on 87 TGCT specimens and 36 samples of CIS cells microdissected from single paraffin-embedded tumour sections from 40 patients, including multiple specimens of CIS and TGCT cells of varied histology microdissected from 24 individual patients. Seventy-seven microsatellite markers were used to assay these samples for LOH at candidate regions selected from the literature, mapping to 3q, 5q, 9p, 11p, 11q, 12q, 17p and 18q. Construction of deletio...
Inheritance and Testicular Cancer
Oncology, 1987
S_umary Statistical analysis of published data on the age of onset of germ cell tumours of the testis and of the prevalence of bilateral disease in familial and general cases suggest the following: 1. Patients with bilateral disease carrm the same genetic predisposition as familial cases. 2. Males with the hereditary predisposition develop none. unilateral or bilateral tumours in the proportions 55%. 38% and 7% respectively. 3. One-third of all testis cancer patients are genetically predisposed to the disease. 4. The 2.2% risk to brothers of cases as reported elsewhere can be accounted for by the homozygous (recessive) inhenrtance of a single predisposing gene.
Nature Genetics, 2009
Genes mutated in congenital malformation syndromes are frequently implicated in oncogenesis1,2, but the causative germline and somatic mutations occur in separate cells at different times of an organism's life. Here we unify these processes for mutations arising in male germ cells that show a paternal age effect3. Screening of 30 spermatocytic seminomas4,5 for oncogenic mutations in 17 genes identified 2 mutations in FGFR3 (both 1948A>G encoding K650E, which causes thanatophoric dysplasia in the germline)6 and 5 mutations in HRAS. Massively parallel sequencing of sperm DNA showed that the FGFR3 mutation increases with paternal age, with a similar mutation spectrum at the K650 codon to that in bladder cancer7,8. Most spermatocytic seminomas show increased immunoreactivity for FGFR3 and/or HRAS. We propose that paternal age effect mutations activate a common "selfish" pathway supporting proliferation in the testis, leading to diverse phenotypes in the next generation including fetal lethality, congenital syndromes and cancer.
Nature genetics, 2017
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have transformed understanding of susceptibility to testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs), but much of the heritability remains unexplained. Here we report a new GWAS, a meta-analysis with previous GWAS and a replication series, totaling 7,319 TGCT cases and 23,082 controls. We identify 19 new TGCT risk loci, roughly doubling the number of known TGCT risk loci to 44. By performing in situ Hi-C in TGCT cells, we provide evidence for a network of physical interactions among all 44 TGCT risk SNPs and candidate causal genes. Our findings implicate widespread disruption of developmental transcriptional regulators as a basis of TGCT susceptibility, consistent with failed primordial germ cell differentiation as an initiating step in oncogenesis. Defective microtubule assembly and dysregulation of KIT-MAPK signaling also feature as recurrently disrupted pathways. Our findings support a polygenic model of risk and provide insight into the biological basis...