Independent investigators have previously identified differential expression of two of these three genes, hepsin and beta-microseminoprotein, in prostate cancer.
Together with the human data, this suggested that MSMB expression defines an anatomical domain in the mouse prostate that is molecularly most similar to human prostate cancers.
Previous studies have suggested a potential biomedical utility of PSP94 in applications such as diagnosis/prognosis and in treatment of human prostate cancer (PCa).
Recent functional work has shown that different alleles of the significantly associated SNP in the promoter of MSMB found to be associated with prostate cancer risk, rs10993994, can influence its expression in tumors and in vitro studies.
For the two SNPs that had significant differences between more and less aggressive disease rs2735839 in KLK3 (P = 8.4 x 10(-7)) and rs10993994 in MSMB (P = 0.046), the alleles that are associated with increased risk for PCa were more frequent in patients with less aggressive disease.
The observations that rs10993994 is the strongest associated variant in the region and its risk allele has a major effect on the transcriptional activity of MSMB, a gene with previously described prostate cancer suppressor function, together suggest the T allele of rs10993994 as a potential causal variant at 10q11 that confers increased risk of prostate cancer.
Our results indicate that the amount or nature of mRNA transcripts expressed from the LMTK2, HNF1B and MSMB candidate genes is altered in prostate cancer, and provides further evidence for a role for these genes in this disorder.
We conclude that MSMB is unlikely to be a familial PrCa gene and propose that the high-risk alleles of the SNPs in the 5'UTR effect PrCa risk by modifying MSMB gene expression in response to hormones in a tissue-specific manner.
We examined the association between rs10993994 genotype and MSP levels in a sample of 500 prostate cancer-free men from four racial/ethnic populations in the Multiethnic Cohort (European Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Japanese Americans).
A plausible functional basis for a few loci, such as FGFR2 for breast cancer and MSMB for prostate cancer, has been elucidated, but the majority are not understood and suggest new mechanisms of carcinogenesis.