The changing landscape of genetic testing for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer

It took Angelina Jolie’s announcement in 2013 to bring broad awareness of hereditary breast and 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 1800s, the concept that cancer can result from inheritance of a single faulty gene first made its way into the scientific literature when Knudson2 published his famous “2-hit hypothesis” in 1971.
Source: Current Problems in Cancer - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Source Type: research