MicroRNA 92a-2*: a biomarker predictive for chemoresistance and prognostic for survival in patients with small cell lung cancer.

Purpose: Although the majority of patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) respond to initial chemotherapy, those with disease progression at first response assessment (chemoresistance) have inferior outcomes. There is a need for predictive biomarkers to aid investigators in designing future clinical trials that better stratify patients beyond standard clinical and laboratory parameters and to identify new treatments for this patient subpopulation. We hypothesized that tumor microRNAs (miRNAs) could serve as predictive biomarkers for chemoresistance and prognostic biomarkers for survival of patients with SCLC treated with systemic chemotherapy.

Pathway targets to explore in the treatment of small cell and large cell lung cancers.

Introduction: With low 5-year survival rates and little progress in therapy, improvements in therapeutic strategies for the treatment of small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and large cell lung cancer (LCC) are warranted. We hypothesized that different SCLC and LCC microarray data sets will share commonly perturbed pathways leading to the identification of new targets for therapeutic development.

Methods: Per gene mean expression fold change ratios were calculated from four publicly available microarray data sets consisting of a total of 113 profiled samples.