© 2002 Elsevier
Expression patterns for 7 and 20 genes that were selected as discriminators of relapse versus continuous complete remission (CCR) for two types of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, T-ALL and hyperdiploid >50 ALL. (from E-.J. Yeoh et al., Cancer Cell 1:133–43, 2002.)
Countless things can go wrong in the complicated cell division process. Checkpoints fail, genomic instability increases, and when anarchy reigns, cancers spread. In trying to assess what is doing the damage and predict the damage yet to be done, doctors have an admittedly blunt set of tools to profile renegade cells. Histopathology and general prognostic indicators such as health, age, and metastatic spread do little to account for the breadth of tumor variety even within fairly specialized tumor types.
Since researchers first started toying with microarrays, they have considered the molecular profiling of tumors to be an important potential use. The genes that switch on and off ...
