Kennedy RD, Bylesjo M, Kerr P, Davison T, Black JM, Kay EW, Holt RJ, Proutski V, Ahdesmaki M, Farztdinov V, Goffard N, Hey P, McDyer F, Mulligan K, Mussen J, O’Brien E, Oliver G, Walker SM, Mulligan JM, Wilson C, Winter A, O’Donoghue D, Mulcahy H, O’Sullivan J, Sheahan K, Hyland J, Dhir R, Bathe OF, Winqvist O, Manne U, Shanmugam C, Ramaswamy S, Leon EJ, Smith WI Jr, McDermott U, Wilson RH, Longley D, Marshall J, Cummins R, Sargent DJ, Johnston PG, Harkin DP.
J Clin Oncol.
PURPOSE Current prognostic factors are poor at identifying patients at risk of disease recurrence after surgery for stage II colon cancer. Here we describe a DNA microarray-based prognostic assay using clinically relevant formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples. PATIENTS AND METHODS A gene signature was developed from a balanced set of 73 patients with recurrent disease (high risk) and 142 patients with no recurrence (low risk) within 5 years of surgery.ResultsThe 634-probe set signature identified high-risk patients with a hazard ratio (HR) of 2.62 (P < .001) during cross validation of the training set. In an independent validation set of 144 samples, the signature identified high-risk patients with an HR of 2.53 (P < .001) for recurrence and an HR of 2.21 (P = .0084) for cancer-related death. Additionally, the signature was shown to perform independently from known prognostic factors (P < .001). CONCLUSION This gene signature represents a novel prognostic biomarker for patients with stage II colon cancer that can be applied to FFPE tumor samples.
Tags: Biomarker, Cancer, Gene expression