Genetic testing could increase lung cancer survival rates
11:47 p.m. Monday, February 26, 2007
"When Patricia Van Dusen was getting ready for hip surgery, she had no idea anything else was wrong.
"They found that I had a spot in my right lung and everyone said, 'well we’re gonna take care of this first before you have the other surgery'," Van Dusen said.
Fast Facts
- This year, about 213,380 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in this country. About 160,390 men and women will die from the disease.
- Roughly 30 to 35 percent of patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (the most common type of lung cancer) eventually experience a recurrence of the cancer.
- Duke University Medical Center have recently developed a tool, called the Lung Metagene Score, to estimate the risk of recurrence in patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer.
- The screening tool may eventually be useful to determine which patients need more aggressive follow-up and which ones may be able to avoid chemotherapy.
More information about the Lung Metagene Score or Phase III trial is available at www.askbig.org. General information on lung cancer can be obtained from the American Cancer Society or the National Cancer Institute.
Although she had never smoked, she had early stage lung cancer and had surgery to remove the lesion.
"I’ve been under observation for almost two years," Van Dusen said.
Doctors jnow about one-third of their patients will die because their ling cancer returns, but they have no way to know which ones. Now, a new kind of test may tell them.
"You can look at genes and patterns of genes in patients to actually predict what is going to happen to that patient," thoracic oncologist Dr. Anil Potti said.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have developed the first-ever genomic test to help doctors decide who needs aggressive treatment. It's called the lung mutagene predictor and is up to 85 percent accurate.
"We arrive at these sets of patterns of genes by looking at the entire human genome, more than 30,000 genes," Potti said.
By analyzing the molecular make-up of each patient's tumor, the test can predict the individual's chance of relapse.
"If a particular patient's pattern looked very similar to that, then that particular patient would be at very high risk for recurrence," Potti said.
Patricia would have welcomed such a test when she had surgery.
"It'd be wonderful if you could know that, and, and uh be sure," Van Dusen said.
As it is, she can only hope her lung cancer is gone for good.
The next step is a large multi-center clinical trial to see whether high risk patients using the test will benefit from getting chemotherapy.
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