Dr Ros Eeles

Studying prostate and breast cancer genes

Dr Ros Eeles at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton is studying prostate and breast cancer genetics.

She is also involved in helping to evaluate the NHS breast screening programme, ensuring that the service continues to improve. To this end, she is investigating alternatives to mammography for women at greater risk of the disease.

Prostate cancer genetics

There is strong evidence that some men carry genes that increase their risk of prostate cancer. To track these down, Dr Eeles co-ordinates several large studies of families with a history of prostate cancer. Her team have so far found that inheriting a faulty BRCA2 gene – which is known to increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer in women – increases the risk of prostate cancer in men.

She is now involved in an international study to see if prostate cancer screening, using the PSA test, can spot the disease early in men with a faulty BRCA2 gene.

Breast cancer screening

In 2005, Dr Eeles's research suggested that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) might be better than conventional mammography at spotting breast cancer in younger women, particularly those who are genetically predisposed to the disease .

She is now analysing her results to see if inherited faults in a woman's BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes can affect the results of MRI screening. This will reveal whether these women would benefit from screening using MRI.

Other research

Dr Eeles also runs several other projects. She is looking at how our lifestyle choices, like our diet and weight, interact with breast and prostate cancer genes to affect our cancer risk. Detecting cancer is another focus of her work, investigating whether measuring levels of key proteins in certain bodily fluids could provide a way to detect breast and prostate cancers.

And she is studying the impact of genetic testing for breast cancer genes on women’s mental wellbeing.