DCEG News Updates
The latest news and research findings from the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.
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African American, Hispanic, and Latino people, as well as individuals with limited education or experiencing poverty, reside in areas disproportionately affected by carcinogenic industrial emissions, a new study finds.
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Risk prediction for incident breast cancer among U.S. Black women was improved with the addition of polygenic risk score (PRS) to questionnaire-based factors. Ruth Pfeiffer and colleagues validated the performance of a previously published PRS for Black women and tested its performance when combined with models using questionnaire-based risk factors. Performance metrics were similar to models for women of European ancestry.
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Zhiwei Liu, Ph.D., former tenure-track investigator in the Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch, will begin a new position in mid-January. He investigated the role of infection and immune response in the etiology of virus-related cancers—primarily Epstein-Barr virus and nasopharyngeal cancer, and hepatitis B virus and hepatocellular carcinoma.
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The NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology launched a new data science training resource to help early-career cancer researchers and trainees gain basic skills in navigating the world of cancer data science.
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Dr. Barry Graubard retired from DCEG at the beginning of 2024. He focused on developing new statistical methodologies at the interface between biostatistics and survey sampling with particular emphasis on cancer epidemiology, making fundamental contributions to the use of national population-based surveys to improve the representativeness of cohort, case-control, nested case-control, and cross-sectional studies.
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The Helicobacter pylori Genome Project, an international and multidisciplinary team of ~250 scientists, have sequenced the genomes and mapped the population structure of over one thousand strains of the bacterium H. pylori, known to cause non-cardia gastric cancer, the most common anatomical subtype, collected from around the world.
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Christian Abnet and Katherine McGlynn participated in an expert panel, convened by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which found sufficient evidence that reduction or cessation of alcohol consumption reduces risk for both oral and esophageal cancer.
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In December 2023, Dr. Stewart, senior investigator in the Clinical Genetics Branch, was elected a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, one of the nation’s oldest medical honor societies.
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In December 2023, at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting, Dr. Blanche Alter received the Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology, in recognition of her numerous accomplishments in bone marrow failure research.
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A multi-disciplinary, international team of experts identified differences in the number of mosaic chromosomal alterations (mCAs) in children from sub-Saharan Africa with Burkitt lymphoma (BL), compared to children without BL. Similar patterns were observed in sub-Saharan African adults. These findings suggest a role for environmental factors in the frequency of mCAs in sub-Saharan African individuals and indicate mCAs in circulating leukocytes could have relevance for future BL risk. These novel findings were published in Nature Communication on December 6, 2023.
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The NIH Intramural Research on Hispanic/Latino Populations Meeting was held in December to promote trans-NIH research collaborations to address health disparities among Hispanic/Latino populations, who are underrepresented in health research. Drs. Constanza Camargo and Katherine McGlynn were two of the meeting organizers.
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Dr. Minal B. Patel in the Laboratory of Translational Genomics was selected for the 2024 Sallie Rosen Kaplan Fellowship program.
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Stephen Chanock was featured as part of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Stories series in a video titled, "A Career Committed to Defeating Cancer."
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Rena Jones, Mary Ward, and colleagues, observed increasing concentrations of a specific per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the serum of pregnant women to be associated with increased risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in their offspring. Investigators in the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch are the first to explore the association between prenatal PFAS exposure and risk of childhood leukemia. Their findings were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
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Smoking-attributable and smoking-unrelated lung cancer death rates declined from 1991 to 2018 in the U.S., according to a new study from Dr. Meredith Shiels and colleagues.
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A series of studies using data from the HIV/AIDS Cancer Match Study provide evidence to inform recommendations for anal cancer screening and emphasize the importance of early anal cancer detection and treatment among people with HIV. The papers were published by Drs. Haas and Shing, part of Dr. Shiels’s research group. The findings
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Shahinaz Gadalla, M.D., Ph.D., discusses her research on stem cell transplants and the path to improving survival for the NIH Intramural Research Program's news column, "Research in Action."
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Bryan Valcarcel, M.D., M.P.H., postdoctoral fellow in REB, was selected for the ASH's Clinical Research Training Institute (CRTI) program, whose goal is to produce innovative leaders in clinical hematology.
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Dr. Richard Remigio, a postdoctoral fellow in the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, discusses his work on the health repercussions of changing environmental conditions in NIH’s Intramural Research Program (IRP) blog, I am Intramural.
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Mary L. McMaster, M.D., senior clinical specialist in the clinical genetics Branch, and captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, retired from DCEG in December 2023. Dr. McMaster devoted nearly 25 years to longitudinal studies of families with rare cancer predisposition syndromes.