Someone kindly sent me this paper on how gene expression can be used to track insufficient DNA repair, which can lead to relapse in melanoma, making it potentially useful as both a prognostic and predictive biomarker for the disease. Regular readers will notice that I am slowly changing my opinion of gene expression studies as a result of articles like this one :-).

According to the researchers:

"Over-expression of DNA repair genes was shown to be associated with reduced relapse-free survival, thicker tumors and tumors with higher mitotic rate.

Preliminary data are also reported suggesting that DNA repair genes are overexpressed in tumors from patients who do not respond to chemotherapy."

Resistance to treatment is one of the biggest ongoing problems associated with treatment of melanoma, both with approved therapies and also pipeline drugs, so finding ways to detect it earlier (and the reasons why) would potentially help in sequencing with different drugs.

So what was involved in this study, which is the largest gene expression study to date in melanoma?  The authors decided to see whether formalin-fixed tissue analysis would be useful:

"Gene expression profiles were identified in samples from two studies (472 tumors). Gene expression data for 502 cancer-related genes from these studies were combined for analysis."

The findings were quite interesting.

Basically, the increased expression of DNA repair genes most strongly predicted relapse, and was associated with thicker tumours.  Increased expression of RAD51 was the most predictive of relapse-free survival (RFS). In addition, RAD52 and TOP2A were independent predictors of RFS in the analysis.

The authors concluded:

"Over-expression of DNA repair genes (predominantly those involved in doublestrand break repair) was associated with relapse. These data support the hypothesis that melanoma progression requires maintenance of genetic stability."

In the past, we have discussed synthetic lethality and DNA repair on this blog in breast and ovarian cancers, with respect to PARP inhibitors seeking to repair damaged DNA and prolong survival outcomes. Based on the current analysis, it looks as though a similar approach may be useful in melanoma. This may give clues for future pipeline development of new therapeutics designed to tackle the specific underlying biology of the cancer.

It should be noticed, though, that the results are describing the factors contributing to relapse from chemotherapy (dacarbazine, DTIC) rather than current pipeline drugs in development for melanoma such as PLX-4032 (Roche/Plexxikon) or ipilimumab (BMS).

I would be very interested to see whether the biomarkers identified in this research for chemotherapy would also apply to the targeted therapies.  It is possible that they may not, or possibly they could help reverse or repair some of the changes occurring.  Either way, finding ways to address the DNA repair may be a fruitful area of study.

 

ResearchBlogging.org Jewell, R., Conway, C., Mitra, A., Randerson-Moor, J., Lobo, S., Nsengimana, J., Harland, M., Marples, M., Edward, S., Cook, M., Powell, B., Boon, A., de Kort, F., Parker, K., Cree, I., Barrett, J., Knowles, M., Bishop, T., & Newton-Bishop, J. (2010). Patterns of Expression of DNA Repair Genes and Relapse from Melanoma Clinical Cancer Research DOI: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-10-1521