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One of our faithful readers suggested this topic. My first introduction to the concept of epigenetics may have been in a lecture that the late Don Coffey gave at a course I helped organize at the Given Institute in Aspen which still goes on today. Don was a pied piper to hundreds of students at all levels at Johns Hopkins, and on his first visit to the course told them about arriving late at the Denver airport, driving his rental car too fast over Vail pass, then exiting and hiding under a bridge while a State Patrol car zoomed over him, and getting back on the road to make it to Aspen just in time. Not a bad way to endear yourself to some younger physicians in training!
His signature illustrative story was that of the fertilized hen’s egg. There it sits, with all the information needed to make a full chicken encoded in the DNA, but nothing happens until it is put in an incubator and the temperature rises. Only then does the machinery kick in to go from a single cell to billions of cells with everything from feathers to an intestinal tract. “How does that happen?”, he would ask, and then proceed to talk about how the DNA is wrapped around histones as shown in the following illustration:
Dr. Coffey would then show pictures of DNA in prostate cancer cells, some of which was compactly wound around the histone proteins (and therefore inactive) and some of which was “open for business” with long loops of DNA strands sticking out from a chromosome. I love the simplicity of this illustration, because it demonstrates how not only temperature can influence the long string of base pairs that otherwise are the deceptively simple ATCGTCCATA… code, but also begins to explain how environmental factors, drugs, aging, and diet can change gene expression. My hiking friend, who is somewhat of a eugenics devotee, thinks mankind will evolve to [his view of] perfection by using CRISPR to modify just the DNA sequence and change everything from physiognomy to behavior. I, of course, disagree based on epigenetics. A woman in her first trimester who eats too much broccoli one evening might well affect her child’s math score by 1/10 of a point…
But back to prostate cancer! As shown in the above figure, one of the common ways genes and their expression is modified is through methylation. The chemistry is shown in this figure and a complete article on DNA methylation from Wikipedia is here.
These methylation changes are frequently found in what are known as CpG islands, or areas of the genome that are rich in Cytosine Guanine base pairs, and particularly in the so called “promoter regions” upstream from the gene itself that control whether the gene is “active” or not. In prostate cancer, methylation of an enzyme called GSTP1 was one of the first methylation markers that became useful in detecting prostate cancer. If a man with a highly suspicious rise in PSA was biopsied and there was no cancer found, if the biopsy of the “normal” tissue next to true cancer was analyzed and methylation of GSTP1 was found, it was highly predictive that real cancer was present but just missed. As time went on, many other genes with hypermethylation changes were found, and panels of such genes could be used to detect prostate cancer cells in the urine, potentially replacing invasive biopsies. More recently, utilizing advanced techniques to search for methylation patterns in the whole genome, it has been possible to find markers (probes) for genes (see this article) which are differentially methylated in prostate cancer and have dramatic prognostic significance. Here is one such example showing that depending on which form (allele) of a gene called ATP2A3 (that can be methylated or not) you inherit, it can affect your survival.
Although much of the article from which I copied that figure is way (WAY) over my head, the point of understanding epigenetics is that prostate cancer is much more complicated than just a mutation or two in some cancer causing genes. The expression of a myriad of other genes that can be controlled by methylation or other epigenetic processes can play a major role in what happens to us. As it turns out, this week’s NEJM has an article specifically related to the epigenetics of prostate cancer as it evolves from localized to metastatic. Here is the key illustrative figure and accompanying explanation.
As this story unfolds, “precision medicine” will become a way to individualize prostate cancer treatment. However… the heterogeneity of prostate cancer metastases will remain a major challenge in the practical application of such knowledge. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already supported prostate cancer research through my Movember effort, feel free to wander over to my website and make a contribution – and THANKS to all of you who helped me reach my goal!
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