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AACR Award for Strangeways Researchers

Congratulations to Maya Ghoussaini and Mikkel Zahle Oestergaard of the Strangeways Research Laboratories who have won awards from the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR).

These awards contribute towards the costs of attending the AACR meeting, which is taking place in San Diego, California, from 12 to 16 April.

Ghoussaini has been awarded a highly-competitive AACR-AstraZeneca Scholar-in-training Award. Ghoussaini works on identifying genetic susceptibility to breast cancer with Bruce Ponder and Alison Dunning. At the meeting she will present the team's latest results on how single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the genome increase susceptibility to some types of cancer. Using the results of a genome-wide association study to identify breast cancer susceptibility variants, the group have recently been focussing on a region of chromosome 8 (8q24). This 1.18Mb long 'desert' contains no known genes but is bounded by two candidate cancer susceptibility genes; FAM84B and c-MYC. This region is strongly associated with breast cancer risk, and so far researchers have reported that it contains at least nine cancer-associated variants. The work that will be presented shows that there are at least five haplotype blocks within this region that are specifically associated with risks of different cancers.  One block is solely associated with risk of breast cancer, three others solely with prostate, and a fifth alters risk of prostate, colorectal and ovarian, but not breast cancer. These findings suggest that there are at least five separate functional variants within the 8q24 region.

Oestergaard is one of six speakers (out of 100 nominated) who have been chosen to speak at a special symposium called 'Future Leaders, New Directions', and has also been awarded the costs of attending the meeting. He will speak on his PhD work, carried out in Paul Pharoah's laboratory, on the development and implementation of statistical tests for studying two-way genetic interactions in genome-wide association studies. Genetic variants that interact may have little or no single-locus effect on disease risk, and might therefore not be detected with single-locus based analysis. The team has carried out a genome-wide interaction analysis for breast cancer susceptibility. To the researchers' knowledge, this is the first time that a genome-wide analysis of genetic interactions for a common disease has been carried out. Oestergaard is also testing a hypothesis that genetic interactions are more likely to occur among functionally related genes. The aim of this study is to develop a candidate gene pair approach to study genetic interactions. To do this, the research group has calculated a probabilistic functional linkage graph with collaborators from Harvard Medical School, which integrates information on gene expression, protein interactions, phenotypic similarity, phylogenetic profiling and protein sequence patterns.

Laura Blackburn

Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute