ICGC Project on Early Onset Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most frequent malignant tumor in males and the second most frequent cause of cancer-related death. Currently, in Germany, more than 60,000 prostate cancers are diagnosed every year. Although most of these patients are treated in a curative attempt, more than 10,000 German men die from prostate cancer annually. Owing to the demographic changes of our society, a further doubling of prostate cancer incidences during the next 20 years is expected.

Characterization across 292 prostate cancer genomes revealed age-related genomic alterations and a clock-like enzymatic-driven mutational process contributing to the earliest mutations in prostate cancer patients. Our integrative analysis identified four molecular subgroups, including a particularly aggressive subgroup with recurrent duplications associated with increased expression of ESRP1, which we validate in 12,000 tissue microarray tumors (Figure 1). Finally, we combined the patterns of molecular co-occurrence and risk-based subgroup information to deconvolve the molecular and clinical trajectories of prostate cancer from single patient samples (Gerhauser et al., Cancer Cell 2018).

The image illustrates key findings from the ICGC-EPOCA study on early-onset prostate cancer. It features a graph comparing recurrence-free survival rates, an anatomical diagram of the prostate, and analyses related to cancer methylomes, including single-cell and whole-genome characterizations.

Ongoing projects:

  • Comprehensive characterization of the prostate cancer DNA methylome by whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (Batra et al., in preparation)
  • Prostate cancer heterogeneity deconvolution through single cell profiling of chromatin accessibility and transcriptomic output (in collaboration with Mathieu Lupien as a Joint Tandem Research Project within the DKFZ-Princess Margaret Cancer Center Clinician and Medical Scientist Program, Furlano et al., in preparation)
  • The epigenome landscape of prostate cancer (collaborative project in the Pan-Prostate Cancer Group (PPCG).
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