Approved research

Pituitary Tumor GWAS: Discovery of Susceptibility Alleles

Lay summary

The specific aim of this project is to discover common susceptibility alleles associated with the risk of pituitary tumor development. To date, there are no reports of pituitary tumor GWAS in European-based populations. Recently, in a GWAS of Han Chinese, the authors reported three regions associated with pituitary tumor risk. We are conducting a Pituitary GWAS with samples from Brazil and the US. The UK Biobank samples will be an important additional set for our GWAS, increasing the power of our study to find genetic markers for pituitary tumor susceptibility in European populations. Our research aim, to find susceptibility alleles for pituitary tumor, may be important for improving the prediction and detection of this type of tumor. The biobank UK data will be combined with genotyped samples from Brazil and the USA association analysis based on a GWAS for pituitary tumors. Control DNA will also be extracted from healthy blood donors with similar population based self-described ethnicity. The DNA will be genotyped and analysis will be conducted by investigators blinded to all personal identifiers at the Cancer Genomics Research Laboratory (CGR) ? in the National Cancer Institute?s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). Our proposal is for getting genotyped data for the subset of participants who have/had diagnosis of Pituitary tumor using the optimal data field searches based on advice of the UK Biobank. We will also need two times number of samples without Pituitary Tumor as controls. Controls samples should be random samples without history of cancer, but age and sex matched with the Pituitary Tumor samples.