Cancer Res: Scientists have developed new software that can decode the ancestry of cancer ancestors

Could knowing where your ancestors came from be the key to getting better cancer therapies? Perhaps so, how can we trace the ancestral roots of cancer back to modern solutions? Recently, a research report entitled "Genetic Ancestry Inference from Cancer-Derived Molecular Data across Genomic and Transcriptomic Platforms" published in the international journal Cancer Research, scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and other institutions said through research, The answer may lie hidden in
vast databases and hospital archives containing hundreds of thousands of tumor samples.

In this study, the researchers revealed lineage links between cancer and race, and they developed a special software that can accurately infer the ancestors of continents from the DNA and RNA of tumors, a study that may help clinicians develop new strategies for earlier cancer detection and personalized therapies
.

Researcher Krasnitz said why do people of different races and ethnicities develop different types of cancer at different rates? Because they have different habits, living conditions, and exposure to multiple factors (i.
e.
, all kinds of social and environmental factors), but there are also possible genetic factors
。 In the paper, the researchers trained the developed software using hybrid DNA profiles, which they then created from cancers with known backgrounds and unrelated cancer-free genomes, and tested the software's performance using pancreatic, ovarian, breast and blood cancer samples from patients of known ancestral ancestry, and found that the software matched these hybrid profile features to the populations of continents with more than 95 percent
accuracy.

Image source: https://aacrjournals.
org/cancerres/article/doi/10.
1158/0008-5472.
CAN-22-0682/711637/Genetic-Ancestry-Inference-from-Cancer-Derived

Now researchers have built a good model, but few individuals come from a single ancestor, to some extent they are mixed, so the researchers have examined tumor samples of unknown ancestral ancestry more deeply and revealed the mixture of bloodlines, while still preceding more regional specificities, so what is its specificity? For now, researchers believe that the characteristics of West and East African populations are relative.

Researchers Krasnitz and colleagues recently joined a collaborative study of colorectal cancer in the population, and this study will lead them to shed light on how colorectal cancer develops genetic mutations in different ways depending on a particular race or ethnicity, and they hope to further refine the software to infer not only the ancestor of the entire genome, but also the sequence
of each individual in it.

If we can identify more local ancestral ancestry that are susceptible to different cancers or other aggressive diseases, Belleau, the researcher said, we may be able to identify specific parts of the genome and target them
.
Today, a simple DNA swab can tell you where you're coming from and which diseases you inherit, and in the future it may be able to help defeat those diseases
.
In summary, the results of this study suggest that the current large amount of cancer-derived molecular data may potentially be applicable to disease research oriented to ancestral lineage, without the need to match cancer-free genomes
or patients' self-reported ancestral ancestry.
(Biovalley Bioon.
com)

Original source:

Pascal Belleau，Astrid Deschênes，Nyasha Chambwe, et al.
 Genetic Ancestry Inference from Cancer-Derived Molecular Data across Genomic and Transcriptomic Platforms, Cancer Research (2022).
DOI: 10.
1158/0008-5472.
CAN-22-0682