Hui-Yi Lin, Ernest K. Amankwah, Tung-Sung Tseng, Xiaotao Qu, Dung-Tsa Chen, Jong Y. Park

Angiogenesis has been shown to be associated with prostate cancer development. The majority of prostate cancer studies focused on individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) while SNP-SNP interactions are suggested having a great impact on unveiling the underlying mechanism of complex disease. Using 1,151 prostate cancer patients in the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) dataset, 2,651 SNPs in the angiogenesis genes associated with prostate cancer aggressiveness were evaluated. SNP-SNP interactions were primarily assessed using the two-stage Random Forests plus Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (TRM) approach in the CGEMS group, and were then re-evaluated in the Moffitt group with 1,040 patients. For the identified gene pairs, cross-evaluation was applied to evaluate SNP interactions in both study groups. Five SNP-SNP interactions in three gene pairs (MMP16+ ROBO1, MMP16+ CSF1, and MMP16+ EGFR) were identified to be associated with aggressive prostate cancer in both groups. Three pairs of SNPs (rs1477908+ rs1387665, rs1467251+ rs7625555, and rs1824717+ rs7625555) were in MMP16 and ROBO1, one pair (rs2176771+ rs333970) in MMP16 and CSF1, and one pair (rs1401862+ rs6964705) in MMP16 and EGFR. The results suggest that MMP16 may play an important role in prostate cancer aggressiveness. By integrating our novel findings and available biomedical literature, a hypothetical gene interaction network was proposed. This network demonstrates that our identified SNP-SNP interactions are biologically relevant and shows that EGFR may be the hub for the interactions. The findings provide valuable information to identify genotype combinations at risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer and improve understanding on the genetic etiology of angiogenesis associated with prostate cancer aggressiveness.