Lung Cancer Is the Current Focus of the Tumor Sequencing Project

Researchers participating in a major international research project studying gene expression in lung adenocarcinoma have found that the majority of mutated genes in the tumor cells were not previously known to be linked to this type of cancer.

These findings, published in the November 4, 2007, online edition of Nature, were accumulated by investigators associated with the Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP), an ongoing effort to apply large-scale approaches to the identification of genomic changes in lung adenocarcinoma.

The investigators studied more than 500 tumor specimens from lung cancer patients. They used dense single nucleotide polymorphism arrays to identify a total of 57 significantly recurrent events. They found that 26 of 39 autosomal chromosome arms showed consistent large-scale copy-number gain or loss, of which only a handful had been linked to a specific gene. They also identified 31 recurrent focal events, including 24 amplifications and 7 homozygous deletions. Only six of these focal events are currently associated with known mutations in lung carcinomas.

"This view of the lung cancer genome is unprecedented, both in its breadth and depth,” said senior author Dr. Matthew Meyerson, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School (Cambridge, MA, USA). "It lays an essential foundation and has already pinpointed an important gene that controls the growth of lung cells. This information offers crucial inroads to the biology of lung cancer and will help shape new strategies for cancer diagnosis and therapy.”

All data generated by the TSP are being made available to the scientific community in public databases.


Related Links:
Harvard Medical School
TSP Data