Gene signatures may help predict lung cancer survival

(18 August 2008: VIDYYA MEDICAL NEWS SERVICE) -- A new study provides perhaps the strongest evidence yet that profiling the activity of genes in lung tumors yields information that can help physicians and patients make treatment decisions. Yet the researchers caution that lung tumors are genetically diverse and it may be difficult to develop a single gene signature that could reliably classify all patients. The findings appeared online in Nature Medicine July 20.

The NCI Director's Challenge Consortium for the Molecular Classification of Lung Adenocarcinoma analyzed 442 lung tumors from patients with known health outcomes. Previous research suggested that lung tumor signatures may provide information such as whether patients may benefit from aggressive treatments, but the signatures and the results often varied from study to study.

The Consortium developed new gene signatures, and their prediction models produced risk scores that correlated with the actual outcomes of patients. Most models performed better with clinical data, leading the researchers to conclude that prognostic models for early stage lung cancer should include both molecular and clinical information, as has been done in prostate and breast cancers.

Drs. David Beer of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and James Jacobson of NCI's Cancer Diagnosis Program led the study, which included a blinded validation step to assess the performance of new gene signatures.

"We put the Consortium together and initiated the study both to explore the challenges involved in carrying out these large confirmation studies for molecular signatures and to identify strategies that could be used to overcome these challenges," said Dr. Jacobson. "I think this work will be a reference point for how these studies should be carried out."

In addition to NCI and the University of Michigan, the Consortium includes researchers from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Ontario Cancer Institute.

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