Link between cancer and lymphoma, a risk factor

Follicular lymphoma is often caused by a translocation between chromosomes 14 and 18, resulting in the overexpression of a cancer-causing gene called BCL-2. Human geneticist Jianjun Liu and his team at the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore teamed up with researchers in the US and Europe. They analyzed sequences of HLA genes from 689 people with follicular lymphoma and 2,446 healthy controls from three independent population cohorts. In the HLA-DRB1 sequence, Liu and his co-workers identified a genetic variant at the site encoding the 13th amino acid of the resulting protein. Six amino acids naturally occur at this position. Of these, two were associated with a high risk of contracting follicular lymphoma, two were classified as low risk and two fell in between. “Since this variant explains only a fraction of the risk, further studies are needed to identify additional variants and epidemiological risk factors that may be used in combination with this genetic information to provide more informative clinical risk prediction”.