Oct 29 2008
CAS researchers recently made a new advance in research into breast cancer risk among Chinese women.
In collaboration with scientists from Nanjing Medical University, a research team led by Prof. WANG Hui with the CAS Institute of Nutritional Sciences, the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, carried out a case-control study on the relationship between breast cancer risk and PALB2, a gene encoding a protein that may function in tumor suppression.
As reported in a recent issue of Clinical Cancer Research, four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which tagged all 19 of the reported SNPs covering PALB2 were selected and genotyped in 1,049 patients with breast cancer and 1,073 cancer-free controls in a female Chinese population.
Based on the multiple hypothesis testing with the Benjamini-Hochberg method, they found that tagging three SNPs (rs249954, rs120963, and rs16940342) were associated with an increase of breast cancer risk.
Scientists believe the discovery could lay significant theoretical bases for screening highly risked people among the Chinese populations.