Mar 15, 2006

Predicting Chemo Success

Posted in Cancer at 12:01 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment

French researchers have identified almost 700 genes in the tumours of colorectal cancer patients
whose expression was different between patients who subsequently responded well to combined chemotherapy and patients who were resistant to the therapy. The findings could ultimately help cancer specialists decide which course of treatment for patients with colorectal cancer is most likely to work best.

Sandrine Imbeaud from the CNRS and Pierre and Marie Curie University, Villejuif, France, used microarrays to analyse the gene-expression patterns of samples from colon tumours and liver metastases collected from 13 patients with colorectal cancer. The microarray analyses were carried out before the patients were treated with combined chemotherapy of folinic acid,
5-fluorouracil and irinotecan. The team identified 679 genes that were produced differently in patients who later responded well to chemotherapy.

Details of the research were published today in the journal Genome Biology.

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