Our ERA Chair Kari Hemminki attended the German Cancer Congress of 2022 and gave a presentation ‘Cancer of unknown primary (CUP)—search for the primary site’.
Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is a relatively common cancer, which is diagnosed at the metastatic stage. Despite extensive diagnostic work-up, the primary tumor often remains unidentified. When the primary tumor remains unknown treatment cannot be target for that cancer. Thus survival in CUP is worst of all cancers (median survival 3 months) but at the level of pancreatic cancer. The Hemminki team found in 2011 that familial risk in CUP patients is often increased in some defined cancers, such as lung, kidney, liver, ovarian, colorectal and breast cancers and melanoma (K. Hemminki; J. Ji; J. Sundquist; X. Shu: Familial risks in cancer of unknown primary: tracking the primary sites. J Clin Oncol. 2011 Feb 1;29(4):435-40. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2010.31.5614). The team hypothesized in the paper that familial clustering of CUP with other cancers may be informative of the primary sites. The team published subsequently many papers of the same topic and these were the subject of Hemminki’s presentation in the German Cancer Congress.
