Gene Found for Sporadic Breast Cancer

A study suggests that a gene newly named EMSY shuts down the action of functional BRCA2 to fuel cancer's development and also has a role in repairing damaged DNA.

Inheriting faulty BRCA genes can trigger hereditary breast and ovarian cancer but the role of these genes in sporadic cancer has not been known. The EMSY gene is thought to be the answer to why breast and ovarian cancers develop in women who have no family history of these cancers. When researchers analyzed the gene sequence of 551 breast and 360 ovarian tumors, they found extra copies of EMSY in 13% of breast cancers and 17% of ovarian cancers, but none in normal tissue and hardly ever in other forms of cancer. Cancer patients who have extra copies of the EMSY gene have a lower survival rate, an average of 6.4 years, compared to 14 years for other patients.

"Discovering such an important new gene is very exciting and gives us the piece in the jigsaw we've been looking for,” said Professor Tony Kouzarides, who led the project at Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research Institute (Cambridge, UK; www.welc.cam.ac.uk). "We'll now have a much more sophisticated image of the genetic changes triggering breast and ovarian cancer in women who haven't inherited a high risk of cancer but develop it anyway.”




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