Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University Hospital for Einstein have found a biomarker in head and neck cancers that can predict whether a patient's tumor will be life-threatening (American Journal of Pathology, January 9, 2012).
The biomarker is considered particularly promising because it can detect the level of risk immediately following diagnosis. This discovery could become a component of a new test to guide how aggressively patients with head and neck tumors should be treated, according to the study authors.
Previous efforts to identify biomarkers for guiding treatment of head and neck cancer have not developed anything clinically useful for patients, noted senior co-author Geoffrey Childs, PhD, a professor of pathology at Einstein, in a press release.
In their study, Childs and his colleagues took tissue samples from tumors and nearby healthy tissue of 123 head and neck cancer patients at Montefiore Medical Center and measured levels of 736 members of microRNAs. Certain members of this family of RNAs, which regulate protein abundance in cells, are abnormally expressed in head and neck cancers and every other malignant cell type yet examined. Of all the microRNAs measured, one in particular -- miR-375 -- stood out for being the most down-regulated in head and neck tumors compared with its levels in adjacent normal tissue.
The researchers ranked these 123 patients according to how extreme the difference was between the miR-375 in their tumor and adjacent normal tissue. All patients were then followed throughout the course of their illness.
MiR-375 proved to be a highly useful biomarker for predicting disease outcome, the study authors noted. The patients for whom the difference between their tumor and normal-tissue miR-375 levels was most extreme were nearly 13 times more likely to die or nine times more likely to experience metastasis of their cancer compared with patients with higher miR-375 ratios.
As as a result of this study, miR-375 could become part of a laboratory test to determine which patients have potentially lethal tumors and therefore should be treated aggressively following initial diagnosis, the researchers concluded.
