The twentieth international symposium of the Sapporo Cancer Seminar Foundation: gene environment interaction and cancer prevention.

Abstract

The main goal of this Symposium was to discuss new information that could be used for the development of effective and novel approaches in cancer prevention. Mounting evidence indicates that genetic predisposition to cancer plays an important role in the etiology of the disease and that multistage carcinogenesis is for the most part based on multiple genetic changes, favoring cell survival. It is also evident that a variety of environmental factors lead to carcinogenic changes and determine cancer-causative or cancer-facilitative genetic changes; these factors may be endogenous in origin, as for example those that are endocrinologic in nature, or may come from the external environment, as for example products in tobacco smoke or in industrial pollution. It is therefore obvious that gene-environment interactions play a pivotal role in carcinogenesis and consequently may offer specific sites of intervention that may be useful for the development of cancer prevention. In general, cancer prevention can be implemented through Public Health measures, as is typically the case for intervention on smoking, industrial pollution, aflatoxin B contamination or, when we know more about it, dietary habits. On the other hand, it should become possible to design more rational chemoprevention and immunoprevention trials as more becomes known about the genetic changes predisposing to cancer and about the gene products that are responsible for the phenotypic changes leading to neoplasia.