Variant analysis of prostate cancer in Japanese patients and a new attempt to predict related biological pathways

There are regional and/or ethnic differences in tumorigenic pathways among several types of cancer, including prostate cancer (PCa). However, information on genome‑wide gene alterations and the transcriptome is currently only available for PCa patients from Western countries. In order to profile the genetic alterations in Japanese patients with PCa, new panels were created to examine nucleotide sequence variations in 71 selected PCa‑related genes (KCC71) and to detect all fusion RNA transcripts known in PCa (PCaFusion). An analysis of 21 Japanese PCa cases identified 33 different somatic variants in 24 genes in the KCC71 panel, including 2 in SPOP (F102V and F133L), 2 in BRCA2 (I1859fs and R2318ter, resulting in premature termination of the polypeptide), and 1 each in BRAF (K601E), CDH1 (E880K) and RB1 (R621S), as pathogenic alterations. Unexpectedly, the TMPRSS2‑ERG fusion transcript was detected in only 1 case, although the SLC45A3‑ELK4 and USP9Y‑TTTY15 fusion transcripts, known as transcription‑mediated chimeric RNAs, were detected in all examined cases. A new pathway analysis with The Cancer Network Galaxy (TCNG), a cancer gene regulatory network database, was also applied in an attempt to predict molecular pathways implicated in PCa in the Japanese population. Based on the 24 genes having somatic variants identified by the panel analysis as initial seed genes, a putative core network was finally established, including 5 identified genes, namely TNK2, SOX9, CDH1, FOXA1 and TP53, with high commonality from TCNG datasets. These genes are expected to be involved in tumor development, as revealed by the results of an enrichment analysis with Gene Ontology terms. This analysis must be further extended to include more cases in order to verify this method and also to elucidate the characteristics of PCa in Japanese patients.