A paper that came out last month in Cell describes a massive effort to generate the exome and/or genome sequences of 183 tumor/normal pairs for people with a specific type of lung cancer. Authors hailed from Harvard University, New York University, the University of Cologne, MIT, and many other institutions.
Through this major collaboration to examine lung adenocarcinoma, for which affected patients have a five-year survival rate of about 15 percent, scientists “identified novel mutated genes with statistical evidence of selection and that likely contribute to pathogenesis,” they write in the paper. The genes implicated in lung adenocarcinoma from this study corroborate earlier links between this disease and many of the genes. By grouping variants together, the study also found signatures that correlate with a patient’s history of smoking as well as alterations of genes linked to the cancer.
In addition to the biological advance in understanding this disease, the authors suggest that this may have relevance downstream as well. “The candidate genes identified in this study are attractive targets for biological characterization and therapeutic targeting of lung adenocarcinoma,” they write.
We were proud to see that this work included using our Pippin Prep platform for size selection. It’s wonderful to have our technology contributing to a study of this magnitude, and one that could ultimately help prevent some of the 500,000 deaths that occur globally each year due to lung adenocarcinoma.
Link to: Mapping the Hallmarks of Lung Adenocarcinoma with Massively Parallel Sequencing. Cell 150, 1107–1120, September 14, 2012.