The UK ICGC Prostate Cancer Analysis Network

The Project

The Cancer Research UK funded Prostate ICGC project was launched in 2011 with a view to analysing the genomes of 250 cancerous prostates in order to learn more about the molecular contribution to, and biomarkers of, the severity of the disease as well as adding to our knowledge of the biology and characterization of prostate cancer. Led out of The Royal Marsden, and ICR, the project was, from the outset, a collaboration between clinicians, biologists, pathologists and analysts (statisticians, epidemiologists, bioinformaticians, computational biologists etc.). Subsequent iterations of the project have seen more complex data sets being generated for the study cohort, with a corresponding increase in the complexity of required analyses. The project is part of several ecosystems of cancer sequencing projects including The PanProstate Cancer Group and ICGC-ARGO.

The Analysis Network

Over the lifetime of the project, there have naturally been changes within the analysis group, but the institutions currently involved include

• The University of East Anglia
• The Welcome Trust Sanger Centre
• The Institute of Cancer Research
• The University of St Andrews
• The University of Cambridge
• The University of Manchester
• The University of Oxford

Support

Since 2023, the network has been supported by an Isaac Newton Institute network grant funded through the EPSRC.

Outputs

The analysts in this network have contributed to several papers using data from the Cancer Research UK funded Prostate ICGC project including:

• Burns D, Anokian E, Saunders EJ, et al. (2022) “Rare Germline Variants Are Associated with Rapid Biochemical Recurrence After Radical Prostate Cancer Treatment: A Pan Prostate Cancer Group Study” Eur Urol. 82 201-211
• Hurst R, Meader E, Gihawi A, et al. (2022) “Microbiomes of Urine and the Prostate Are Linked to Human Prostate Cancer Risk Groups” Eur Urol Oncol. 5 412-419
• Wedge DC, Gundem G, Mitchell T, et al. (2018) “Sequencing of prostate cancers identifies new cancer genes, routes of progression and drug targets” Nature Genetics 50 682–692
• Camacho N., Van Loo P., Edwards S., et al. (2017) “Appraising the relevance of DNA copy number loss and gain in prostate cancer using whole genome DNA sequence data” PLoS Genetics 13(9): e1007001
• Behjati S, Gundem G, Wedge DC, et al. (2016) “Mutational signatures of ionizing radiation in second malignancies” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 12605
• Cooper C, Eeles R, Wedge DC, et al. (2015) “Analysis of the genetic phylogeny of multifocal prostate cancer identifies multiple independent clonal expansions in neoplastic and morphologically normal prostate tissue” Nature Genetics 47, 367–372
• Massie CE, Spiteri I, Ross-Adams H, et al. (2015) “HES5 silencing is an early and recurrent change in prostate tumourigenesis” Endocrine-related Cancer 22, 131-144
• Gundem G, Van Loo P, Kremeyer B, et al. (2015) “The evolutionary history of lethal metastatic prostate cancer” Nature 520, 353–357
• Ju YS, Alexandrov LB, Gerstung M, et al. (2014) “Origins and functional consequences of somatic mitochondrial DNA mutations in human cancer” eLife 10.7554/eLife.02935 Tubio JMC, Li Y, Ju YS, *et al. (2014) “Extensive transduction of nonrepetitive DNA mediated by L1 retrotransposition in cancer genomes” Science 345, DOI:10.1126/science.1251343