Hereditary Cancer Predisposition Studied in a Russian-Japanese Project

The team consists of KFU, RIKEN, and Tatarstan Clinical Cancer Center employees.

300 patients have already received corrected diagnoses thanks to this work. Russia is very interesting in this regard because of its ethnic diversity. Some types of cancer, as is known, are distributed unevenly among ethnic groups.

Head of Extreme Biology Lab Oleg Gusev commented, “With oncologists’ help we can get access to unique specimens which have been selected for ethno-specific mutations and give a picture of cancer-related genetics across the nation. The results end up in a unified database and on doctors’ workstations. Colleagues from Federal Medical-Biological Agency and RIKEN compare these results with international oncological databases”.

The local database currently includes 350 female patients with hereditary types of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. The plans are to study several thousand people in different Russian regions; contacts with Ufanese colleagues (Ufa Oncological Center and Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics of the Ufa Center of RAS) have been already established.

Head of the Molecular Diagnostics Lab of the Republican Cancer Center Marat Gordiev said this about the new data, “We have understood which mutations are encountered more often in studied genes. Also, new genes contributing to hereditary predisposition to cancer have been discovered for the first time. Joint efforts allowed us to show their role in cancer, as is the case with CDK12. Kazan becomes a recognized center of hereditary oncology studies”.

This unique partnership provides for a quicker translation of research into practice, which includes both treatment and prevention.