Lung Cancer: Determining Your Fate
Reported May 20, 2008
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A genetic test to determine a patients risk of lung cancer recurrence is on the horizon.
Columbia University researchers recently tested five genetic profiles to see how well they predict the likelihood cancer will return in patients whose non-small cell lung cancer was discovered early and surgically removed. This common type of lung cancer accounts for roughly 80 percent of all lung cancers and recurs often, even when treated early. If we knew specifically in which patients the cancer was likely to come back, we could recommend more aggressive therapy to those patients, lead researcher William Bulman, M.D., a clinical instructor of medicine at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, was quoted as saying.
The five gene signatures were tested on 21 patients with squamous or adenocarinoma tumors. Researchers say the signatures were accurate 40 to 80 percent of the time, differing with the type of tumor.
Our findings not only indicate that genetic signatures have clinical utility in personalizing the treatment of lung cancer, but also that it may be necessary to use different gene-based risk predictors with different tumor subtypes, Dr. Bulman said. He says this new information adds to the larger effort to discover why some early stage lung cancers progress and metastasize while others dont.
SOURCE: American Thoracic Societys International Conference, Toronto, May 16-21, 2008
