LONDON, Dec 8: Scientists have found a “missing link” gene that connects inherited and “sporadic” breast and ovarian cancer.

The gene, called Emsy, provides the solution to a medical mystery. Researchers believe it will provide new avenues for investigating the diseases and developing novel treatments and tests.

Faulty BRCA 1 and 2 genes are known to trigger hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. But until now, no role could be found for these genes in sporadic tumours.

The new findings suggest that Emsy shuts down the action of functional BRCA 2 to fuel a cancer’s development.

Professor Tony Kouzarides, from Cancer Research UK, who led the study at Cambridge University, said: “Discovering such an important new gene is very exciting and gives us the piece in the jigsaw we’ve been looking for.

“We’ll now have a much more sophisticated image of the genetic changes triggering breast and ovarian cancer in women who haven’t inherited a high risk of cancer, but develop it anyway. It’s going to give us new lines of investigation and potentially exciting angles of attack.”

Only 5 per cent of breast cancers run in families. Scientists have been hunting for the genes that cause the 95 per cent of breast cancers which are not inherited.

Women who inherit a damaged BRCA 2 gene have a 40-to-60-per-cent chance of developing breast cancer at some time of their lives, and a 10-to-20-per-cent chance of developing ovarian cancer.

It was long suspected that BRCA 2 might play a role in sporadic breast and ovarian cancers, despite the fact that the gene is very rarely damaged within these tumours.—dpa