Discoveries
'Gene signature' may indicate tumors' tendency to spread
A tool for predicting tumors' potential for spreading to other parts of the body has tantalized medical researchers for decades. With it, doctors could gain a new ability to distinguish between dangerous tumors and less-threatening ones, and design treatments more precisely.
A step in that direction came recently from Dana-Farber investigators Sridhar Ramaswamy, MD, and Todd Golub, MD, who discovered a pattern of gene activity in cancer cells — a so-called gene "signature" — that may be an early sign of tumors' tendency to spread, or metastasize. The discovery was made with advanced scanning equipment capable of reading the activity of thousands of genes in a cell at a time.
Ramaswamy and Golub compared gene activity in cells from spreading and nonspreading solid tumors. They found a group of 17 genes that differed significantly between the two groups. Cells with this gene signature may be preordained to travel throughout the body, even if no signs of spread are evident when the tumor is first detected, researchers say.
The finding is intriguing because most cancer deaths are caused not by original, or primary, tumors, but by tumor cells that leave their original site to form new growths in other organs. "Knowing in advance whether a tumor is likely to metastasize is crucial to developing better treatments," Ramaswamy says.
He and his colleagues are now studying large numbers of tumors to see if the gene signature is clinically useful in determining whether newly diagnosed tumors are apt to spread.
