The Changing Landscape of Genetic Testing for Hereditary Breast/Ovarian Cancer

It took Angelina Jolie’s announcement in 2013 to bring broad awareness of hereditary breast/ovarian cancer (HBOC) to the general public. However, it has been 25 years since Mary-Claire King mapped BRCA1 to chromosome 17 through linkage analysis involving painstaking collection of a large number of families with multiple cases of early-onset breast cancer.1 Though familial “clusters” of breast cancer had been described since the early -1800’s, the concept that cancer can result from inheritance of a single faulty gene first made its way into the scientific literature when Knudson published his famous “two-hit hypothesis” in 1971.
Source: Current Problems in Cancer - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Source Type: research