New Type of Bowl Cancer Identified by Researchers

New Type of Bowl Cancer Identified by Researchers

Researchers have discovered a new sub-type of bowl cancer which is more worse in comparison to other types of colon cancer, according to a new study published in the Journal of Nature Medicine.

During this study researchers from Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge

and the Netherlands took analysis of 90 patients who were suffering from stage II colon cancer and concluded that the samples can be placed in a group consisting of three distinct sub-types.
Later-on researchers developed a panel, comprises of 146 genes that could easily differentiate above three sub-types. They further study on 1100 patients in order to confirm their findings.
Two sub-types were already been reported in the literature but third one was recently been discovered in some patients during this study. Those patients who were suffering from this new sub-type of cancer were worse in comparison to other types of bowl cancers. Such patients were also resistant to cetuximab, a drug commonly used for the treatment of this disease.

Researchers then determined some developmental phases of this new sub-type and found a clear difference between the developmental phases of other sub-types that was considered as a reason of more aggressive nature of this new sub-type of bowl cancer.

Dr. Louis Vermeulen, lead researcher on the study, said: “We identified a new sub-type of bowel cancer by studying how the genes in tumours behaved. This allowed us to develop a quick and easy test to identify this sub-type, which has a poor prognosis and responds poorly to anti-EGFR therapy – a recognised treatment for many bowel cancers. “When we further examined what properties described the three sub-types we found that this third sub-type was already primed to spread from an early stage, something that was previously only thought to occur much later in tumour development. We speculate these differences between the different sub-types may arise from the cell of origin for the tumour rather than any specific mutation.”

Kate Law, Cancer Research UK’s director of clinical research, said: “As April is bowel cancer awareness month, this kind of research reminds us of the importance of looking not just at specific mutations, but also how certain genes behave. “Bowel cancer survival rates have doubled over the last 40 years – research and a better understanding of the disease has been core to this. Studies like this one are essential for uncovering the basic building blocks of cancer, allowing us to adopt a more personalised approach to curing cancer and develop better treatments sooner.”

The abstract of this article is given below.

Colon cancer is a clinically diverse disease. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to determine which patients will benefit most from adjuvant therapy and impedes the development of new targeted agents¹. More insight into the biological diversity of colon cancers, especially in relation to clinical features, is therefore needed. We demonstrate, using an unsupervised classification strategy involving over 1,100 individuals with colon cancer, that three main molecularly distinct subtypes can be recognized. Two subtypes have been previously identified and are well characterized (chromosomal-instable and microsatellite-instable cancers)². The third subtype is largely microsatellite stable and contains relatively more CpG island methylator phenotype–positive carcinomas but cannot be identified on the basis of characteristic mutations. We provide evidence that this subtype relates to sessile-serrated adenomas, which show highly similar gene expression profiles, including upregulation of genes involved in matrix remodeling and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. The identification of this subtype is crucial, as it has a very unfavorable prognosis and, moreover, is refractory to epidermal growth factor receptor–targeted therapy.

Read full article here.

Reference: Melo, F. et al. Poor-prognosis colon cancer is defined by a molecularly distinct subtype and develops from serrated precursor lesions (2013) Nature Medicine. DOI: 10.1038/nm.3174