Last Updated: 2004-03-15 17:00:18 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By David Douglas

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Gene expression profiling appears to offer an effective method for predicting clinical outcome in patients with prostate cancer, and could lead to tailored treatment, researchers report in the March 15th issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

As lead investigator Dr. Gennadi V. Glinsky told Reuters Health, "this work holds a significant promise of major improvement in clinical decision making process regarding individualized management of prostate cancer patients by allowing the physicians to make better treatment selection decisions at the time of diagnosis."

Dr. Glinsky of Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, San Diego, and colleagues investigated the gene expression profiles of prostate tumors of patients "with distinct clinical outcomes after therapy." They thus identified small clusters of genes that discriminated between recurrent and nonrecurrent disease with 90% and 75% accuracy in two independent cohorts.

They identified the predictor genes in 21 tumors, and then validated the derived algorithm in a different set of 79 tumors. Ultimately, the researchers correctly classified 88% of patients with recurrence of prostate cancer within a year as indeed having a poor prognosis.

The gene expression-based prostate cancer recurrence predictor algorithm, Dr. Glinsky continued, "seems to improve the prognostic power of the best established markers of outcome" and it has shown "a robust performance in two independent cohorts of prostate cancer patients."

Furthermore, he concluded, "it appears to require a survey of a small number of genetic loci, thus making highly feasible the follow-up large-scale validation study using multiple analytical platforms."