PNNL

Abstract

Despite apparently complete surgical resection, approximately half of resected early stage lung cancer patients relapse and die of their disease. Adjuvant chemotherapy reduces this risk by only 5-8%. Thus there is a need for better identifying who benefits from adjuvant therapy, the drivers of relapse and novel targets in this setting. We present a rationale and framework for the incorporation of high-content RNA and protein measurements into integrative biomarkers and demonstrate the potential of this approach for predicting risk of recurrence in a group of lung adenocarcinomas. In addition, we characterize the relationship between mRNA and protein measurements in lung adenocarcinoma and show that it is outcome specific. Our results suggest that mRNA and protein data possess independent biological and clinical importance, which can be leveraged to create higher-powered expression biomarkers.