Lung cancer is currently the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Usually, the most common treatment for the early stages of this cancer is surgery to remove the tumor. However, even when caught at an early stage, certain cancers like adenocarcinoma return thirty percent of the time. In the past, there has been no accurate way to predict whether this will occur. Nonetheless, a new study suggests that the gene activity in healthy tissue surrounding tumors could better predict whether a patient’s lung cancer might return after surgery. 

In this study, scientists analyzed tissue samples from 143 men and women who had early-stage lung adenocarcinoma. The study explored the utility value of the transcriptome, the complete set of RNA molecules that tell cells what proteins to make. Analysis of RNA collected from healthy tissue next to the tumor cells predicted that cancer would recur 83 percent of the time, while RNA tumors themselves were only informative 63 percent of the time. They observed that the activity of genes in the healthy lung tissue that was adjacent to tumor cells was able to more accurately indicate the possibility of a patient’s cancer returning within five years of surgery than the corresponding gene expression in tumor cells. 

These findings suggest that the pattern of gene expression in healthy tissue might serve as an effective and, until now, elusive biomarker to help predict lung cancer recurrence in the earliest stages of the disease. The researchers showed that the reason the healthy tissue was more of an accurate predictor of disease recurrence was because it identified the expression of genes that are known to be associated with inflammation or heightened immune system activity.

By Rachel Lyons ’24, SNHS Member