Simple two-gene test sorts out similar gastrointestinal cancers

The following is an excerpt from an M.D. Anderson news release entitled “Simple Two-Gene Test Sorts Out Similar Gastrointestinal Cancers; Top Scoring Pair Analysis Applicable to Other Cancers, Personalized Care”.

Houston, February 12, 2007—“A powerful two-gene test distinguishes between a pair of nearly identical gastrointestinal cancers that require radically different courses of treatment, researchers report this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This simple and accurate test has the potential to be relatively quickly implemented in the clinic to benefit patients by guiding appropriate treatment,” says senior author Wei Zhang, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pathology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The analytical technique employed to tell gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) from leiomyosarcoma (LMS) with near perfect accuracy will have wider application in more individualized diagnosis and treatment of other types of cancer, study co-authors from M.D. Anderson and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle conclude.

GIST was once thought to be a type of leiomyosarcoma because both originate in the smooth muscle cells of the gastrointestinal tract. However, GIST is treatable with the targeted medication known as Gleevec and is relatively unresponsive to chemotherapy. The opposite is true of LMS.

An existing test distinguishes among the two cancers with about 87% accuracy, but intensive and time-consuming additional analyses are required for uncertain cases, Zhang says…”

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Jonathan Trent, M.D., Ph.D., also stated in an interview with Medscape, “We hope that the test will be commercially available in about 6 to 12 months, in the meantime, clinicians can send samples to us for testing.”

M.D. Anderson is also working on a similar approach to differentiate sarcoma responders from non-responders, according to Dr. Trent.