Radiation Therapy May Identify Biomarkers Through
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic (USA) have discovered biomarkers that can face the individualized administration of radiotherapy in cancer patients. The results appeared in the online edition of the journal Genome Research.
“If it exceeds the resistor to radiotherapy, the treatments would be more effective for some people,” says Dr. Liewei Wang, genomics researcher at Mayo Clinic and senior author of the study. “The results could one day enable the expansion of novel therapies aimed at selected subgroups of patients suffering from cancer.”
Approximately 50 percent of patients with cancer receiving radiation therapy, but the answer (its repercussion on the patient and cancer) can vary enormously and it is believed that in most cases, the cause may be genetic variants, or differences in personal genomes. Dr. Wang and his team investigated 277 different human lymphoblastoid cell lines in an effort to find out more about why some patients respond differently.
As part of its genome-wide association study, scientists integrated the data of gene expression, cell toxicity tests and 1.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, for its acronym in English), which are short sections of genetic code that represent the variants. Then narrowed the field and validated the potential biomarkers in three cell lines to confirm the response to radiation. In the end, they identified five genes whose expression is directly related to the response to radiation.
By Mayo Clinic, other members of the study were Dr. Nifang Niu, Yuxin Qin, Brooke Fridley, Junmei Hou, Krishna Kalari and Minjia Zhu and Tse-Yu Wu, Gregory Jenkins and Anthony Batzler. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Vitality, ASPET Award and Astellas (Jacket Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and Astellas Pharma U.S., Inc.) and another PhRMA Foundation Award (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America).