Lung Cancer DSA: A platform for discovery of biomarkers in lung cancer

A10

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide with poor differential diagnosis of the disease and with low response rates to standard chemotherapy treatment. It is therefore a subject of extensive research focused on identification of reliable genomics biomarkers to aid in accurate classification of the disease, predicting its progression and patients’ response to both available therapies and those in development. Powerful genomics tools used in this research are however lacking disease focus and thus are likely to miss potentially vital information contained in patients’ tissue samples.
 Through a combination of large-scale in-house sequencing, gene expression profiling and public sequence and gene expression data mining we have characterised the transcriptome of NSC lung cancer and used this information to create a unique disease focused microarray - Lung Cancer DSA™ research tool. Built on the Affymetrix GeneChip® platform the tool allows for interrogation of ~60,000 transcripts relevant to Lung Cancer, tens of thousands of which are unavailable on leading commercial microarrays. Presented here are the array design process and the results of experiments carried out to demonstrate the array’s utility for use in biomarker discovery projects with using NSCLC and normal samples.