This news deals with lung cancer and ought to be paid attention to by lung cancer patients. A study claims that at least three tumor microRNAs seem to foresee when first-line chemotherapy may turn out to be unproductive in a few patients suffering from small cell lung cancer.
The study alleged that there are about 32,000 new cases of small cell lung cancers detected each year, and out of that, around 15 and 30 percent could be chemoresistant to first-line therapy.
Glen J. Weiss, M.D., director of thoracic oncology at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare and co-head of the Lung Cancer Unit at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), commented, “For patients with small cell lung cancer, there are really only about two chemotherapy options. We need to be more precise with our treatments and identify earlier who is going to be resistant in order to design better clinical trials that will identify effective therapies for these at-risk patients.â€
The present study included around 34 patients suffering from small cell lung cancer with different stages. Weiss and colleagues examined every one. All of them were supposedly assessed at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare. Around 69.1 years was believed to be the mean age of all the participants. Around half the subjects comprised of men. Every patient was given chemotherapy. About 2 full responses and 13 partial responses were supposedly observed. It was also noted that roughly 2 patients were with stable disease and approximately 4 suffered from progressive disease.
It was seen that supposedly around 3 microRNAs namely miR-92a-2, miR-147 and miR-574-5p were detected as being strongly related to chemoresistance. Even though there were about 47 percent of the patients suffering from hypertension and 32 percent with emphysema or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, neither of these co-morbidities were associated with chemoresistance.
The study was presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer.