Courtesy Timothy Triche, National Cancer Institute
Metastasis, the leading cause of cancer deaths, remains a poorly understood phenomenon. In early-stage lung cancer, for example, 25% to 30% of patients will succumb to the disease even though the tumors are small and detected early. The use of gene-expression analyses has allowed the opportunity to ask whether these high-risk stage I lung cancers can be distinguished from benign tumors so that these patients might receive more aggressive therapy.
This issue's Hot Papers attempted to identify the hallmark features of metastatic cells through gene-expression profiles obtained by microarray analysis. In 2002 David Beer and Samir Hanash at the University of Michigan, and others, described an exhaustive gene-expression profile of lung adenocarcinoma involving 67 early-stage and 19 late-stage tumors.1 In testing the tumors, they devised a panel of 50 predictive genes, including genes previously not known to influence survival. This enabled them to separate ...
