Mots-Clés

Homozygosity mapping, HBD-GWAS, thyroid cancer, prostate cancer, genetic epidemiology

Description

Description of the project: 

It has been shown that incidence rates of differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) and prostate cancer (PC) vary significantly by ethnic group and by geographic location. High incidence of DTC was reported in some Pacific islands whereas incidence rates of PC were among the highest in Oceania, Northern America, and the Caribbean area particularly in men of African descent. While part of this variation in incidence was attributed to screening practices for both cancers, it was suggested that environment and genetic risk factors may also play a role. For both cancers, the risk for DTC or PC among siblings was reported to be much higher than the parent-offspring risk, suggesting that loci with a recessive inheritance might play an important role in the susceptibility to those diseases.

In this project, we hypothesize that recessive variants play a role in DTC and PC risk and explain part of the high incidence observed in some isolated population or ethnic groups. We propose to replicate and identify recessive variants involved in the risk of DTC and PTC using data from EPITHYR, EPIC and PRACTICAL consortia.

More specifically, we will:

(1) extend the HBD-GWAS approach and implement all the methodological developments in a R package that will be made available to the scientific community.

(2) use the HBD-GWAS approach to detect new variants acting recessively in DTC and PC and compare the findings with the ROH approach. The results of the two methods will be contrasted, looking for strengths and weaknesses according to population ethnic background

Supervision   
The PhD student will be supervised by Thérèse Truong (Inserm CESP, Exposome & Heredity) and Anne-Louise Leutenegger (Inserm NeuroDiderot).