Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Tumor Heterogeneity As A Predictor Of Response To Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy In Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer, Alissa Greenbaum, David R. Martin, Therese J. Bocklage, Ji-Hyun Lee, Scott A. Ness, Ashwani Rajput

Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) is the standard of care for locally advanced adenocarcinoma of the rectum, but it is currently unknown which patients have disease that will respond. This study tested the correlation between response to nCRT and intratumoral heterogeneity using next-generation sequencing assays.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: DNA was extracted from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded biopsy samples from a cohort of patients with locally advanced rectal adenocarcinoma (T3/4 or N1/2 disease) who received nCRT. High read-depth sequencing of > 400 cancer-relevant genes was performed. Tumor mutations and variant allele frequencies were used to calculate mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity (MATH) scores as measures of intratumoral …

Dysregulation Of The Mitogen Granulin In Human Cancer Through The Mir-15/107 Microrna Gene Group, Wang-Xia Wang, Natasha Kyprianou, Xiaowei Wang, Peter T. Nelson

Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Faculty Publications

Granulin (GRN) is a potent mitogen and growth factor implicated in many human cancers, but its regulation is poorly understood. Recent findings indicate that GRN is regulated strongly by the microRNA miR-107, which functionally overlaps with miR-15, miR-16, and miR-195 due to a common 5′ sequence critical for target specificity. In this study, we queried whether miR-107 and paralogs regulated GRN in human cancers. In cultured cells, anti-argonaute RNA coimmunoprecipitation with downstream microarray analyses indicates that GRN mRNA is directly targeted by numerous miR-15/107 miRNAs. We further tested this association in human tumors. MiR-15 and miR-16 are known to be …