Gene variant linked to higher risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma

BERKELEY — Researchers have identified a gene variant that carries nearly twice the risk of developing an increasingly common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a group of cancers that develops in the immune system's white blood cells. In a study led by investigators at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Arizona, a common variant in a gene called C6orf15, or STG, was linked to susceptibility to follicular lymphoma, which accounts for 20 to 30 percent of all non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases. It is the first genome-wide association study of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The mutation, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) called rs6457327, was found among the more than 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. "What's exciting about this study is that we found a target in the genome influencing the susceptibility to follicular lymphoma, which helps us discern between three major types of lymphomas," said study co-lead author Christine F. Skibola, an associate adjunct professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "That had not been done before on a genome-wide scale. It is our hope that this research may some day be useful in helping develop prevention, early detection and treatment of this disease." Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the fifth most common type of cancer in the United States, is newly diagnosed in about 66,000 Americans each year, and annually kills nearly 20,000, according to the National Cancer Institute.