International Cancer Genome Consortium

The incidence of prostate cancer in the UK has doubled in the last 15 years, mainly due to increased use of serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing in healthy men. As a result prostate cancer has become the most common cancer in men. Currently 35,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and 11,000 men in the UK will die from this disease. .

Prostate cancer is difficult to manage clinically due to a poor current understanding of what dictates its highly variable natural history, and of what underlies the origin of castration-resistant disease. As many as 50-80% of PSA-detected prostate cancers are biologically irrelevant, that is, even without treatment, they would never have caused any symptoms. However, it is not possible to reliable distinguish indolent from potentially aggressive cancers using convention markers such as PSA, Gleason grade and clinical stage. Treatment of the prostate cancer is also complicated by that fact that the disease is often multi-focal, with apparently genetically distinct cancers frequently arising in a single prostate.

Large variations in incidences occur in different populations, although the underlying reasons for these variations remain to be established. Prostate cancer arising in Asian men, particularly in indigenous Chinese nationals has, long been considered to be of lower incidence and phenotypically distinct disease to that occurring in Caucasian or African-American men. Links set up to collect these cancers include those to Prof. Hongwei Zhang (Shanghai), Dr Ng (Hong Kong), and Dr Yong-Jie Lu (Barts Cancer Institute)

This Cancer Research UK funded Prostate Cancer Network (CR-UKPCN) consists of a multidisciplinary team of histopathologists, urologists, molecular biologists, geneticists and experts in genome technology and bioinformatics. We will collect and analyze 30-50 fold coverage whole genome paired-end sequence data from 250 prostate cancers representing the following groups: (i) cancers from men at different risks of progression; (ii) metastatic castration resistant disease; (iii) apparently separate and genetically distinct (multi-focal) cancers arising in a single prostate; (iii) cancer from arising in men from different ethnic groups.

In parallel it is our intention to collect transcriptomic and epigenetic data on cancers entered into this study. Analyses of the combined datasets will inform on our understanding of the molecular basis of the genetic and clinical heterogeneity of prostate cancer and will provide insights into the reasons for variation in incidence in different ethnic groups. The results may suggest etiological causes for cancer development, and help to personalized treatment for men who develop prostate cancer.

Principal Investigator(s)
Professor Colin Cooper (Institute of Cancer Research) (Joint Lead)
Professor Rosalind Eeles (Institute of Cancer Research) (Joint Lead)
Professor Mike Stratton (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)
Dr Andy Futreal (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)
Professor David Neal (University of Cambridge)
Professor Doug Easton (University of Cambridge)
Professor Steve Bova (Johns Hopkins Cancer Institute)
Professor Chris Foster (University of Liverpool)