Discovery of somatic mutations in lung adenocarcinomas

This was a collaborative study to discover somatic mutations in 188 lung adenocarcinomas. DNA sequencing of 623 genes with known or potential relationships to cancer revealed more than 1,000 somatic mutations across the samples. Our analysis identified 26 genes that are mutated at significantly high frequencies and thus are likely to play a role in carcinogenesis. The observed mutational profiles correlate with clinical features, smoking status, and DNA repair defects. These results are complemented by data integration including SNP array data and gene expression array data (deposited here). Our findings shed further light on several key signaling pathways involved in lung adenocarcinoma, and suggest new molecular targets for treatment. The overall design strategy was to sequence a large number of candidate cancer genes from patients diagnosed with adenocarcinoma with the objective of characterizing cancer genomes. For microarray analysis, a subset of 75 RNAs from a corresponding set of 188 lung adenocarcinomas DNAs were resequenced across 623 genes.