METHYLATION AND THE RISK OF UROTHELIAL CELL CANCER

Abstract

Why don’t we run prevention programs for urinary tract cancers like we do for others? It’s because we don’t know which lifestyle factors, except smoking, are important to cancers of the renal pelvis, ureters, bladder and urethra. We plan to use new technology to measure the ‘epigenome’, the part of the genome that turns genes on or off. This may explain how lifestyle factors influence what genes do, and we hope our findings will help to develop future prevention strategies for these cancers.