Molecular signatures of metastasis in head and neck cancer

Abstract

Background Metastases are the primary cause of cancer treatment failure and death, yet metastatic mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Methods We studied the molecular basis of head and neck cancer metastasis by transcriptionally profiling 70 samples from 27 patients—matching normal adjacent tissue, primary tumor, and cervical lymph node metastases. Results We identified tumor-associated expression signatures common to both primary tumors and metastases. Use of matching metastases revealed an additional 46 dysregulated genes associated solely with head and neck cancer metastasis. However, despite being metastasis-specific in our sample set, these 46 genes are concordant with genes previously discovered in primary tumors that metastasized. Conclusions Although our data and related studies show that most of the metastatic potential appears to be inherent to the primary tumor, they are also consistent with the notion that a limited number of additional clonal changes are necessary to yield the final metastatic cell(s), albeit in a variable temporal order.

SERPINE1 and SMA expression at the invasive front predict extracapsular spread and survival in oral squamous cell carcinoma

“…Some studies have also compared expression signatures from primary tissue paired with matched metastatic tissue and showed similarities in the patterns of expression observed (Roepman et al, 2006;Mendez et al, 2007;Colella et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2008). This supports our hypothesis that molecular determinants of ECS are present in the primary tumour.…”

Integrated genetic and epigenetic analysis identifies three different subclasses of colon cancer

“…For each gene, the average methylation level measured quantitatively and the frequency of positive cases (with methylation level greater than Ͼ15%) are shown in supporting information (SI) Table 6. In an initial analysis, we selected 20 cases to compare methylation analysis for the same genes by different methods [methylated CpG island amplification (MCA) (12), combined of bisulfite restriction enzyme amplification (COBRA) (13), or bisulfite pyrosequencing (14)] and found excellent correlation in methylation between the methods (similar results were observed for 92% cases, using MCA or pyrosequencing methods, and 95% cases using COBRA or pyrosequencing methods). Therefore, we combined all results together for further analysis.…”

Current potential and limitations of molecular diagnostic methods in head and neck cancer

“…Besides this study, several other HNSCC metastatic signatures have been published [33,34,[40][41][42][43]. These HNSCC metastatic signatures were derived using several different profiling platforms and analytical approaches (i.e.…”