| Peripheral
lung adenocarcinoma, and bronchioalveolar carcinoma
(BAC) in particular, continues to account for
the majority of lung cancers in young (<55),
non-smoking, women. BAC patients constitute about
5% of the total lung cancer patients in the U.S.
The incidence of these cancers has risen exponentially
in the United States over the past four decades,
at a time when the incidence of other non-small
cell lung cancers has either levelled off or declined.
Lung cancer overall is now responsible for more
cancer-related deaths than any other cancer, killing
more women in the United States each year than
breast and ovarian cancers combined.
Very little is known about the underlying biology
or genetic basis of BAC. The Mayo Clinic has a
large tumor bank of surgically resected lung cancer
specimens that also contains blood samples from
individual patients. The associated database contains
detailed information regarding clinical follow
up. Among this group of over 5,000 patients, approximately
300 patients have a diagnosis of BAC, and over
400 have adenocarcinoma with BAC features. We
will use this rich clinical resource to investigate
genetic polymorphisms or “SNPs” in
blood samples from patients who have developed
BAC. The recent publication of the International
HapMap Consortium dataset has catalogued over
one million single nucleotide polymorphisms or
“SNPs” within the human genome. It
is thought that this genetic variation amongst
individuals accounts for much of the individual
difference in disease susceptibility for cancer.
In this project, we will use high-density SNP
arrays to investigate over 550,000 individual
SNPs in patients with BAC and matched controls.
This whole genome survey will analyse the majority
of validated SNPs within the human genome in an
attempt to find genetic abnormalities associated
with the development of BAC. SNP associations
with disease susceptibility from this project
will provide lead data toward the project goal
of defining the underlying genetic basis for the
development of BAC.
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