Genomic Discovery of Wilms Tumor

Background

Wilms tumor is the most common kidney cancer in children and is the fourth most common childhood cancer in North America. The majority of the Wilms’ tumor occurs in children before age of five. Because this disease occurs very early in life, it has major public health impact regarding quality of life after treatment and years of life lost in those who do not survive. The best strategy is disease prevention through better understanding the etiology, however there is a lack of large-scale etiological studies of Wilms tumor and much of the its etiology still remains unknown. In particular, there is no study on the effect of parental genotypes and Wilms tumor risk. Identifying children with high risk can help to increase surveillance, and understanding the causes and mechanisms can contribute to the prevention in infancy or early childhood.

Project Goal

We have established the North America Wilms Tumor Study for the following research questions:

1.            Are there genes that increase Wilms tumor risk? If so, which ones?
2.            What are the maternal-fetal effects and parent of origin for these sequence variants?

Being one of the largest study on Wilms tumor, this project will have major impact on public health and our knowledge about Wilms tumor and contribute to disease prevention and understanding the carcinogenesis mechanism.