BARCODE · The use of genetic profiling to guide prostate cancer targeted screening and cancer care

Prostate cancer is the commonest solid cancer in men in the European Community. There is evidence for genetic predisposition to the development of prostate cancer and our group has found the largest number of such genetic variants described to date worldwide. The next challenge is to harness these discoveries to advance the clinical care of populations and prostate cancer patients to improve screening and target treatments. This proposal, BARCODE, aims to be ground-breaking in this area. BARCODE has two components (1) to profile a population in England using the current 77 genetic variant profile and compare screening outcomes with those from population based screening studies to determine if genetics can target screening more effectively in this disease by identifying prostate cancer that more often needs treatment and (2) genetically profiling men with prostate cancer in the uro-oncology clinic for a panel of genes which predict for worse outcome so that these men can be offered more intensive staging and treatment within clinical trials. This will use next generation sequencing technology using a barcoding system which we have developed to speed up throughput and reduce costs. The PI will spend 35% of her time on this project and she will not charge for her time spent on this grant as she is funded by The University of London UK. The research team at The Institute Of Cancer Research, London, UK is a multidisciplinary team which leads the field of genetic predisposition to prostate cancer and its clinical application and so is well placed to deliver on this research. This application will have a dramatic impact on other researchers as it is ground –breaking and state of the art in its application of genetic findings to public health and cancer care. It will therefore influence the work being undertaken in both these areas to integrate genetic profiling and gene panel analysis into population screening and cancer care respectively.""