Project:

Internal R&D Project

Objective:

Resolving Biological Relevance from Gene Expression for lung cancer.

Strand’s Solution: 

Using our in silico approach, we discovered many novel features of lung cancer that warrant further study.

• Several important molecules and pathways have been predicted to operate in lung cancer. First, the down-regulation of surfactant proteins has been shown to be unique among all NSCLC subtypes.
• Using GO analysis, we then determined that the immune editing mechanisms, such as antigen presentation and processing via class II MHC proteins are only present in stage II adenocarcinomas. Moreover, the GSEA results revealed the importance of pathways such as the CXCR4 pathway and the VIP pathway that play a key role in the lung cancer. Most importantly, the combination of expression data and genotyping data gave us new important information related to the gene SLIT2. The SLIT2 deletion is exclusively found in adenocarcinomas and could be considered as a potential biomarker for this type of cancer.
• These findings have broad implications and need to be validated by wet lab experiments.