From the Kalahari to the Tasman: decoding the genetic causes of cancer
Dr Vanessa Hayes knew from a very early age that she wanted to work in the medical profession. What she didn’t realise was that it would be a career that would take her around the world. She has travelled from Cape Town in South Africa where she grew up and across to the Netherlands to complete her PhD in cancer genetics. She has finally settled in Sydney, Australia, where she is making a significant contribution to the depth of knowledge in cancer comparative genomic research as part of the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia.
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Despite funding knockbacks from Australia and overseas, Dr Vanessa Hayes has recently announced the results of a collaboration with an international team of clinicians and researchers to unravel the human genome and consequently, the genetic causes of cancer.
Vanessa co-led an international team of scientists from the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research (CCIA), the University of New South Wales, and Penn State University in the USA, to sequence the genomes of indigenous southern Africans. They were found to be among the world’s most genetically diverse people.
The genomes of four Kalahari Desert Bushmen and an ethnic Bantu are the first to be sequenced from an indigenous population. More than 1.3 million new genetic variants have been added to databases of Human Genome Variation which until now have been largely Eurocentric.
Featured as the cover story in the prestigious journal Nature, the discovery has important implications for medical research, providing potential markers for the origins, treatments and cures for many of the most complex diseases, including cancer. It also raises questions about current scientific assumptions regarding the genetic causes of many diseases.
“It has been well established that the African continent is the cradle of civilisation and therefore the origin of disease, we just haven’t known to what extent,” says Vanessa.
Her work, specifically in understanding the genetic causes of prostate cancer – the most common cancer in NSW – has led to new insights into the make up of the disease.
“What has attracted me to study prostate cancer is the lack of knowledge surrounding the causes of this common cancer,” says Vanessa. “Unlike breast cancer there is no equivalent BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene identified, although it has a strong genetic component. My interest is in using the strong link between ethnic diversity and prostate cancer risk as a tool to identify new prostate cancer susceptibility candidate genes.”
Vanessa hopes that this research will eventually lead to the possibility of genetically testing men for their risk of contracting prostate cancer. A goal she is well on the way to achieving.“I believe that our research effort in prostate cancer holds the potential to identify new candidate genes (or regions of the human genome) responsible for conferring risk to prostate cancer,” she says. “For this purpose we have collected a case-control study of men showing three-way ethnical mixture, representing the extremes of prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates. We will test the identified markers on nationally available prostate cancer resources.”
While she has made many breakthroughs in her work, Vanessa isn’t content to sit back on her laurels. She is currently investigating the genome of the Tasmanian Devil, as well as the facial tumour, which is threatening to destroy this Australian icon.
Cancer research for me is a minefield. There is so much to discover, there are so many complexities and there are relatively few answers.
She also has ambitions to see the field of cancer comparative genomic research becoming a recognised research area in NSW, so the State can play a major role in the worldwide effort to understand tumour genetic variation at the genome level.
“Cancer research for me is a minefield. There is so much to discover, there are so many complexities and there are relatively few answers,” she says. “The contributions to be made in this field are endless.”