DNA methylation profile of prostate cancer aggressiveness in Ghana
Dr Alexandra Lindsey Djomkam Zune - West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens, Accra, Ghana
Can you tell us about your work on the DNA methylation profile of prostate cancer aggressiveness in Ghana?
To begin with, it’s important to know that there’s a disparity in prostate cancer when it comes to the ratio of mortality to incidence. A lot of studies show a high incidence in the Western world and in the Americas but when we look at the level of mortality relative to incidence in Africans it’s pretty high. So most of the factors that have been attributed to this is socioeconomic status. However, we noticed that even in a study in 2019 in America it was shown that the Hispanics had a lower access to healthcare but yet you had higher incidence of mortality in men of African descent. So we wanted to understand apart from socioeconomic status what other factors influence this disparity.
So we decided to look at things that have to do with environment and gene interaction. One of these is epigenetics and the most studied mechanism of epigenetics is DNA methylation. So our focus was looking at DNA methylation and we noticed that when we did a profiling using the Illumina EPIC array platform that we had some probes that were able to distinguish between tumours of high grade and tumours of low grade. So we were able to identify genes that are differentially methylated between these two groups and have not been reported in other studies.
What are the next steps in this research?
It’s a good question because this is one of the preliminary studies in the region because we don’t have data on DNA methylation in prostate cancer. We want to acknowledge that the sample size was quite low. So the next steps are first to increase the sample size to be able to say with confidence that this is what we are seeing even if we increase the sample size. Secondly, because in our output we were able to see that the genes that were differentially methylated were associated with redox balance. Some of the factors that have the inference on the redox balance are infectious pathogens or infectious agents and we know Africa is one of the hubs of infections. So another thing we would like to look at is these different factors, especially infections, that are able to distort the redox balance in the population.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
If there’s anything that I would like to add, it’s just that this is something we hope we can do for many of our populations, apart from Ghana, to be able to map what is the profile for African men. Also to see how this can be translated for clinical practice because, as of the moment, we have some markers which were derived from such studies which are already used in clinical practice for other populations. So we need to have markers that are African-specific which can be useful for the population.
