A Stanford Medicine study of thousands of breast cancers has found that the gene sequences we inherit at conception are powerful predictors of the breast cancer type we might develop decades later and how deadly it might be. The study challenges the dogma that most cancers arise as the result of random mutations that accumulate during our lifetimes. Instead, it points to the active involvement of gene sequences we inherit from our parents—what's known as your germline genome—in determining whether cells bearing potential cancer-causing mutations are recognized and eliminated by the immune system or skitter under the radar to become nascent cancers.
"Apart from a few highly penetrant genes that confer significant cancer risk, the role of heredity factors remains poorly understood, and most malignancies are assumed to result from random errors during cell division or bad luck," said Christina Curtis, Ph.D., the RZ Cao Professor of Medicine and a professor of genetics and of biomedical data science.
"This would imply that tumor initiation is random, but that is not what we observe. Rather, we find that the path to tumor development is constrained by hereditary factors and immunity. This new result unearths a new class of biomarkers to forecast tumor progression and an entirely new way of understanding breast cancer origins.
" Curtis is the senior author of the study , which is published in Science . Postdoctoral scholar Kathleen Houlahan, Ph.D.
, is the lead author of the rese.