Bioinformatic and clinical experimental assay uncovers resistance and susceptibility mechanisms of human glioblastomas to temozolomide and identifies new combined and individual survival biomarkers outperforming promoter methylation.

Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive and lethal central nervous system (CNS) tumor. The treatment strategy is mainly surgery and/or radiation therapy, both combined with adjuvant temozolomide (TMZ) chemotherapy. Historically, methylation of gene promoter is used as the major biomarker predicting individual tumor response to TMZ.

Pan-cancer experimental characteristic of human transcriptional patterns connected with telomerase reverse transcriptase () gene expression status.

The gene encodes the reverse transcriptase subunit of telomerase and is normally transcriptionally suppressed in differentiated human cells but reactivated in cancers where its expression is frequently associated with poor survival prognosis. Here we experimentally assessed the RNA sequencing expression patterns associated with transcription in 1039 human cancer samples of 27 tumor types. We observed a bimodal distribution of expression where ∼27% of cancer samples did not express and the rest showed a bell-shaped distribution.