Scientists from China and the United States have discovered a new gene that can significantly increase a person’s risk of developing a myeloid malignant tumor, such as leukemia, Xinhua reports.

Malignant myeloid tumors occur when the bone marrow cannot produce enough healthy blood cells. Stem cell transplantation is an effective treatment for blood cancer, although donors remain difficult to find. Therefore, medical scientists have made efforts to understand the mechanisms of these diseases, looking for methods of early diagnosis.

For this study, published in the journal Cell, scientists conducted association studies of rare variants with a large population-based cohort using 460,000 biological samples from blood cancer patients from the UK Biobank, a large medical database.

Thus, they identified a previously unknown risk gene, CTR9, whose functional disruption can cause dysregulation of hematopoietic stem cells and is predicted to lead to a tenfold increase in the risk of myeloid malignancy.

“In the future, we will be able to detect this gene during a medical examination to see if a person is a potential blood cancer patient,” said Zhao Jiawei, lead author of the study.

However, Zhao Jiawei said that the study was mainly based on European genetic data and that its results have not yet been confirmed to be applicable to people from other regions of the world, such as Asia and Africa. (Agerpress)