News Articles about Stomach Cancer

McDuck · Oct 1, 2009

The new system classifies gastric cancers by the signaling pathways the tumors use to grow and spread, as opposed to the more traditional approach that describes them by cell type or structure.
"We identified three oncogenic pathways that were activated in over 70 percent of the gastric tumors we examined," said lead author Chia Huey Ooi, PhD, Research Fellow in the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School. "We also found that combinations of these pathways are significantly related to patient survival."
Stomach cancer is notoriously resistant to chemotherapy and newer biologic-based therapies have not proven very effective. With current treatments, less than a quarter of patients live longer than five years after surgery
Study authors say the new classification system offers physicians the opportunity to stratify patients according to their tumors' pathway profiles and then apply the treatment that is designed to interrupt the signals those pathways use
They used computational methods to map the activation levels of 11 different cell signaling pathways already known to be active in the development of gastric cancer. They found that three pathways -- primary drivers of cell growth and death (NF-kappaB, Wnt/β-catenin and proliferation/stem cell) were deregulated in most of the tumors. The researchers found that stratifying patients by single pathways did not predict outcomes, but stratifying them by combinations of pathways did.