Markers of Biochemical Recurrence in Prostate Cancer

In the new study, researchers used targeted maximum likelihood estimation to identify the prognostic genes and estimate both the causal effects in cancer patients.

68 genes were found to be linked with biochemical recurrence at three years after prostatectomy in prostate adenocarcinoma, as per the study "Identification of microenvironment related potential biomarkers of biochemical recurrence at 3 years after prostatectomy in prostate adenocarcinoma" in Aging-US.//

Researchers obtained the gene expression data of prostate adenocarcinoma from the TCGA project and identified the differentially expressed genes based on immune-stromal components.

Prostate Specific Antigen [PSA] & Prostate Cancer Diagnosis
PSA blood test is specific to prostate gland but not necessarily a cancer specific test but is commonly used to diagnose prostate cancer.

POSTN and NETO1 were correlated with androgen receptor expression, a main driver of prostate adenocarcinoma progression.

Finally, five genes were validated in another prostate adenocarcinoma cohort.

Dr. Fuzhong Xue from The Shandong University said, "Prostate cancer is a common malignant tumor and the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men."

Prostate adenocarcinoma is the most common type of prostate cancer, whereas other types of prostate cancer are relatively rare.

In this study, the authors used targeted maximum likelihood estimation, a doubly robust method to detect the prognostic genes and estimate both the average and individual causal effects.

When estimating the causal effect of the prognostic gene on the BCR status, controlling too many covariates might result in the poor performance of the estimator.

Thus, they applied the algorithm CovSel to select the minimal conditioning set that was sufficient for unbiased effect estimations of the target gene on the BCR.

Moreover, the causal effects of these genes were estimated for individual therapies.

The Xue Research Team concluded in their Aging-US Research Output, "we used TCGA dataset to identify the potential prognostic genes in PRAD. Using the associations between the immune/stromal scores and the prognosis of PRAD, we revealed a set of genes related to the TME and the BCR of PRAD.

These findings might facilitate the prognosis of PRAD. Based on our study, previously neglected genes could be used as biomarkers for PRAD. Finally, further studies of these genes could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the potential relationship between the prognosis of PRAD and the TME."

Source-Eurekalert