Principal Investigators: Christopher Haiman, ScD (University of Southern California)

Co-Investigators: Ann Hamilton, PhD (University of Southern California), Scarlett Gomez, PhD (University of California, San Francisco), Rosemary Cress, DrPH (Public Health Institute), Aaron Thrift, PhD (Baylor College of Medicine), Antoinette Stroup, PhD (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey), Jennifer Beebe-Dimmer, PhD (Wayne State University), Xiao-Cheng Wu, MD/MPH (Louisiana State University – Health Sciences Center), Kevin Ward, PhD (Emory University), Maria Schymura, PhD (Health Research, Inc./New York State Department of Health)

Description: 

• Prostate cancer is one of the most heritable forms of cancer. Studies have identified genetic loci that contribute to about 50% of familial prostate cancer risk.  However, most of these studies have been performed in men of European ancestry, and polygenic risk score-based risk prediction is inadequate in other racial and ethnic populations. This means that men from other racial and ethnic populations will not receive the same benefit as men of European ancestry when such tests become available and offered by their physician to guide medical decisions, including whether to be screening and at what age.
• To improve risk prediction in multiethnic populations, multiethnic genetic studies on prostate cancer risk are needed.
• Christopher Haiman and team are conducting the ongoing NCI/PCF RESPOND study, a collaborative initiative to generate genetic data for >32,000 prostate cancer cases and >74,000 controls of African ancestry by 2024, in order to understand the biological contributors to prostate cancer risk in African American men.
• This Robert F. Smith-PCF Challenge Award will be used to enhance the population-based recruitment of African American men with incident prostate cancer in RESPOND. This will include support of recruitment and patient sample collection activities at established recruitment sites, and to establish new recruitment sites in RESPOND.
• If successful, this project will accelerate the completion of RESPOND study patient cohort enrollment and data collection, which will enable large-scale genomic studies on prostate cancer risk to be performed in the African American population.

What this means to patients:  Dr. Haiman and team are creating a database of genetic data on ~100,000 African American men, in order to identify prostate cancer genetic risk factors and develop a clinical “polygenic risk score” test to identify men at highest lifetime risk of prostate cancer, who should undergo enhanced prostate cancer screening at earlier ages.  This will reduce prostate cancer disparities in African American men by enabling earlier detection and treatment of prostate cancer, when the chance for cures are significantly higher.