Robert Klein
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Genetics
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States, yet most men diagnosed with it will never die of the disease. Screening saves lives, but it also leads to biopsies that find no cancer and to treatment of slow-growing tumors that would never have caused harm.
- Fields
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
prostate cancer
cancer survival
four-kallikrein panel
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Identify genes whose inherited, genetically controlled expression changes alter the risk of dying from prostate cancer, using a transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) with prostate-specific models.
- Find rare inherited coding variants, DNA changes that alter proteins, linked to prostate cancer survival time by whole exome sequencing of cohorts with long follow-up after diagnosis.
- Determine at which stages of prostate cancer progression the identified genetic changes act, using well-annotated patient cohorts.
- Improve the four-kallikrein biomarker predictor of lethal prostate cancer by adding inherited genetic data, so men can be sorted by risk before biopsy.
More about the research
Better tools are needed to pick out, before diagnosis, the men whose cancer is likely to become lethal.
Why it matters
Prostate cancer screening reduces deaths but causes many unnecessary biopsies and treatments of harmless tumors. Adding inherited genetic information to the four-kallikrein blood test could help doctors identify which men are at high risk of dying from prostate cancer before biopsy. This could reduce cancer deaths through early detection while sparing other men unneeded procedures. The new genes found may also suggest pathways behind lethal disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marvin Langston
Stanford University, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Evaluate whether obtaining a baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) measurement before age 50 improves prediction of later aggressive or fatal prostate cancer, using long-term records and stored serum from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Multiphasic Health Checkups cohort.
Erin Peckham-Gregory
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Genetics
Analyze germline whole-genome sequencing data from 191 LCH case-parent trios in the Gabriella Miller Kids First program to define inheritance patterns and the role of de novo mutations in LCH risk.
Jenny Poynter
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify tumor DNA methylation patterns, chemical marks that switch genes on or off, that predict relapse and death in pediatric germ cell tumors, using the Illumina EPIC array on 500 tumor samples.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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