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Research team announces lung cancer breakthrough

Lung cancer patients may soon be granted peace of mind and be spared an uncertain prognosis, as a National Science Council sponsored team of Taiwanese medical professionals has successfully located a micro ribonucleic acid (RNA) signature that has proven to offer accurate predictions of their survival rates and the outcome of treatments.

The groundbreaking technique was published this month in Cell Cancer, a top medical journal in the field.

The same team published a paper on a messenger RNA (mRNA) signature last year in the New England Journal of Medicine that similarly gave an accurate prognosis for lung cancer patients.

"Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide," said the principle investigator of the medical team, Dean of the National Taiwan University (NTU) College of Medicine Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池), at a press conference yesterday.

"What modern medicine knows about cancer -- its causes, progress and prognosis -- is still the tip of the iceberg. Combined, the two tests will provide us with a light in the dark on how [doctors] can proceed with a patient," said the head author of the paper, Yu Sung-liang (俞松良), an assistant professor at the NTU Center for Genomic Medicine.

The signatures each gives a patient's "hazard ratio," which is the "number of times they are at risk of a relapse compared with the patient population," he said.

Saying the technique could potentially be available within five years, Yang said the signature could save both time and money in the development of "tailor made" lung cancer treatments.

"For example, if the prognosis is poor, we may employ more aggressive treatment methods earlier on; if it is very poor, patients may even opt to withdraw from treatment," he said.

In Taiwan, 93 percent of lung cancers can be subcategorized as non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC), Yu said, adding that after treatment, NSCLC patients have an alarming 80 percent relapse rate within the next five years.

"Traditionally, lung cancer signatures have been on the protein level. However, protein signatures fail to provide accurate enough predictions and classifications of lung cancer patients or point to a suitable treatment method, which could contribute to the high relapse rate," Yu said. "The team aimed to find a signature that is at the RNA level [since RNAs is at the `upper stream' of protein organization] to improve upon the shortcomings."

The main function of RNA is to translate genetic information from DNA into proteins.

MicroRNA, however, is a class of RNA whose sole purpose is regulation, Yu said.

"Like the captain of a team, a single microRNA can be in charge of dozens or hundreds of mRNAs, so to obtain a microRNA signature is another step beyond our mRNA signature last year," he said.

The team is in the process of applying for a worldwide patent for their new discovery, Yang said.
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