DNA methylation in cancer prevention – opportunities and challenges. Martin Widschwendter

The incidence of cancer continues to rise as lifestyles change and people live longer; a shift towards cancer prevention is urgently required. Reliable methods for measuring an individual’s risk of cancer would support innovation in cancer screening, by targeting those at highest risk, and lead to new approaches to primary cancer prevention.
Ideally, risk-predictive tests should take both genetic and environmental factors into account, and be biologically stable and technically reproducible.
The latest evidence suggests that the epigenome and, in particular, DNA methylation-based tests meet all of these requirements.
We will present our latest research using data from cervical cancer screening and cancer prevention settings, and outline the challenges and opportunities that these data present to researchers.
Presenter:
Martin Widschwendter is the Director of the European Translational Oncology Prevention and Screening (EUTOPS) Institute at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
He is leading the HEAP Epigenomic Analysis Work Package (WP8), which uses cohort study data to analyse the epigenome to identify alterations triggered by environmental exposures.