Determination of miRNA Signature in Gastric Cancer Patients Assigned to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy.

• Grant number: 12/12542-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2012
• End date: May 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Pathological Anatomy and Clinical Pathology
• Principal Investigator: Maria Dirlei Ferreira de Souza Begnami
• Grantee: Maria Dirlei Ferreira de Souza Begnami
• Host Institution: A C Camargo Cancer Center. Fundação Antonio Prudente (FAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Gastric cancer (GC) is considered highly aggressive and lethal, being the second leading cause of cancer mortality globally. Currently, surgery is the main option for treating GC. However, depending on the stage, the results are disappoint because in average 85% of GC patients experience a recurrence of the disease after performing curative resection. In the past decade, searching for improvements at the survival rates at GC, several strategies of care complimentary to surgery were applied. Different standards of treatment were established in some parts of the world. When compared with surgery stand alone, neoadjuvant therapy showed an increase of 3 years in relapse free survival, and also an increase in overall and median survival. The research about this matter, however, has been presenting conflitant results, due to the non-existence of consensus about the effects of neoadjuvant therapy. The selection of patients with chemosensitive tumors prior to the neoadjuvant therapy is the key to prevent the possible complications derived from the therapy and the inadequate delay of the surgical treatment. Recent comprehensive analyses of gene expression, such as a miRNA analysis, are able to identify relevant genes which expression profiles appeared to be linked to tumor stage, histological grade, susceptibility to chemotherapy, clinical aggressiveness or prognosis. There are many published reports focusing on the association between GC and signature miRNA. These studies show from the relation between miRNAs and histologic subtype and tumor size up to the capacity of tumor suppression, risk of reccurence and progression of disease. However there were not found any studies analyzing the miRNA signature with the response in patients assigned to different treatments currently available. (AU)