Method of Detecting and/or Treating Colorectal Cancer Based on Divergent Liver Prometastatic Gene Expression Patterns

摘要

A method of detecting prometastatic cancer activity in the liver of a patient suffering from colorectal cancer, as well as a method of diagnosing and treating colorectal cancer according to primary tumor location, based on divergent expression levels and functional classification of specific genes in tumor unaffected hepatic tissue. Specific genes include statistically significant ones of group 1 genes PRDX4, CRP, ID1, MT1E, TNFSF14, MRC1, ICAM1, IL18, IL10, TFN; group 2 genes NGF, EPHA1, ERBB2IP, SDC1, COL18A1, KNG1, ADH1B, CYP2E1; and group 3 genes HP, VTN, RPS27, RPL23, GAPDH, TXN, VEGFA, CEACAM1, IGF1, TGFB1, DDR2, NOS2, and BMP7. These genes are compared with corresponding genes of individuals free of colorectal cancer in magnitude, correlation patterns, clustering patterns, heatmaps and other comparative analyses to derive insight into the tumor microenvironment to detect the onset of tumor growth, which enables early treatment well before conventional clinical signs emerge via any type of imaging, for example. Instead of analyzing the specifically denoted genes in hepatic tissue, the method may be implemented utilizing protein signatures of gene products derived from the patient's blood serum or plasma, in which case, the protein signatures indicate expression levels of the specific genes involved from which the analyses may be performed.