Gene expression profiling of circulating plasma RNA from colorectal cancer patients

Gene expression profiling of circulating plasma RNA is a valuable tool to detect cancer and a potential clinical instrument to study tumor progression and therapy responsiveness. In this study, differential gene expression analysis was used to identify genes specifically increased in cancer patients. Keywords: Disease state analysis We have measured the relative abundance of the different RNA species in plasma through cDNA microarray hybridization, by comparing RNA isolated and amplified from colorectal cancer patients (12) and from healthy donors (8). Each sample was competitively hybridized against a common reference formed by a pool of blood samples from 26 healthy donors.