London – New Breast Cancer Gene Identified

London – A multi-centre international team of researchers has uncovered a new gene that may raise a woman's likelihood of contracting breast cancer by more than a third.

The researchers have also found that the gene called HMMR interacts with the well-known breast cancer gene BRCA1 and BRCA1, which could be a path to breast cancer developing.

According to the researchers, they have not only discovered a single gene that is linked to breast cancer, but also a pathway that may be a potential target for diagnosing or treating the disease.

With a view to determining whether variations in HMMR could heighten breast cancer risk, the researchers studied the genes of 923 Jewish Israeli women with breast cancer, and similar women without breast cancer.

The selection of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Israel for the study was down to the fact that it carries a higher risk of breast cancer than other ethnicities.

It was found that women with a variation in the HMMR gene had a higher risk of breast cancer, even after accounting for mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes.

The researchers said that the risk of breast cancer in women under age 40, who carried the HMMR variation, was 2.7 times the risk of women without the variation.

The researchers verified their findings in a second group of Ashkenazi Jewish women in New York who had a family history of breast cancer but no identified BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, and in a third study of Jewish women with and without breast cancer in New York.

It was found that the risk of breast cancer was 23 per cent higher in women who had one copy of genetic variant, and 46 per cent higher in women who had inherited two copies. [topnews]