Otago researchers find key to kidney tumours

Otago University researchers have discovered why European children are twice as likely to develop kidney tumours as their Asian counterparts.

Professor Tony Reeve, of the university's Cancer Genetics Laboratory, said the team's earlier research had found that the programming of genes in children who developed Wilms' tumours had somehow gone "awry" soon after fertilisation. Tumours from Asian and European children looked different under the microscope.

The research, published in British medical journal the Lancet, showed that a gene produced an excessive amount of growth in about half the cases involving European children.

"Surprisingly this mechanism is absent in Asians, accounting for why the population has one half the rate of this disease than Caucasians," he said.

Dr Reeve said it was known that cancer was sometimes caused by environmental factors and in some cases genetic factors.

"The truly novel and exciting thing about our finding is it doesn't seem to involve either of these. It's something that goes on early in development, affecting genetic programming."

Researchers now want to find out how the error occurs and if there is a way of reversing it.

Long term there could be implications for the treatment of other common adult cancers. Between six and nine new cases of Wilms' tumour are diagnosed in NZ each year, mostly in children under seven. It is curable in 85 per cent of cases.