NEW YORK — The newly isolated gene for elephant man’s disease appears to be a switch that can turn on cancer, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for brain tumors and other lethal cancers, researchers said Thursday.

“The payoff here is going to be that we may come up with a treatment for brain tumors,” said Dr. Allan Rubenstein, medical director of the National Neurofibromatosis Foundation in New York. Elephant man’s disease is properly known as neurofibromatosis, or NF.

The first priority, he said, is to search for a treatment for neurofibromatosis. But that research now holds promise for many others with cancer.

“Research is going to explode in a disease which a couple of years ago was an obscure phenomenon which practically the whole scientific world ignored,” Rubenstein said.

“It’s the kind of understanding we hoped discovery of the gene would lead to,” said the author of the new finding, Raymond L. White of the University of Utah. “I expect it to make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of cancer genetics.”

Researchers cautioned that treatments may be years away.

White’s findings will appear Friday in the scientific journal Cell. The report concludes that the neurofibromatosis gene is one of the family of GAP genes that may operate as anti-cancer genes.