Nick James, Professor of Clinical Oncology at the University of Birmingham and Consultant in Clinical Oncology at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said:

"Scientists have known for a long time that some families have a higher disposition to prostate cancer, but it has been much more difficult to identify the genes involved than for other cancers, such as those found in the breast.

"This work identifies a number of genes that are involved in very rare inherited prostate cancers, but that are also likely to be involved in non inherited prostate cancers which affect many more people.

"This work provides two useful avenues that may lead to improvements for those with prostate cancer. One is that finding faulty genes gives researchers a chance to look at their products that may be good targets for new treatments. And secondly, this discovery may mean that we can target screening for prostate cancer, a process that has been very controversial due to over diagnosis of clinically insignificant cancer, to groups of men that we know to have higher risk of developing the disease."