Development and independent validation of a prognostic assay for stage II colon cancer using formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue.

Purpose: Current prognostic factors are poor at identifying patients at risk of disease recurrence after surgery for stage II colon cancer. Here we describe a DNA microarray-based prognostic assay using clinically relevant formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples.

Patients And Methods: A gene signature was developed from a balanced set of 73 patients with recurrent disease (high risk) and 142 patients with no recurrence (low risk) within 5 years of surgery.

Results: The 634-probe set signature identified high-risk patients with a hazard ratio (HR) of 2.62 (P < .001) during cross validation of the training set. In an independent validation set of 144 samples, the signature identified high-risk patients with an HR of 2.53 (P < .001) for recurrence and an HR of 2.21 (P = .0084) for cancer-related death. Additionally, the signature was shown to perform independently from known prognostic factors (P < .001).

Conclusion: This gene signature represents a novel prognostic biomarker for patients with stage II colon cancer that can be applied to FFPE tumor samples.