The rate of transcription across all genes could serve as a biomarker of cancer with clinical applications. A newly developed algorithm allowed researchers to measure transcription levels more accurately than ever before, leading to the discovery that the degree of hypertranscription in a patient’s tumor cells is fairly predictive of their survival chances, according to a November 23 study in Science Advances.
“Hypertranscription is the global elevation of gene activity that can occur normally during stages of growth in development or in stem cells,” explains Miguel Ramalho-Santos, a cell biologist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an email to The Scientist. “This study finds that hypertranscription is pervasively co-opted by cancer cells across different types of cancer, and is correlated with poorer patient survival,” he says, adding that the work has several important implications, including raising awareness to the ...
