ACC Agilent 44K CGH

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare endocrine malignancy accounting for between 0.02 and 0.2 percent of all cancer deaths. Surgical removal offers the only current potential for cure. Unfortunately, ACC has undergone metastatic spread in approximately 40-70 percent of patients at the time of diagnosis. Standard chemotherapy with mitotane containing regimens is often ineffective and associated with intolerable side-effects. Modern molecular technologies now allow the examination of germ-line and somatic DNA for chromosomal alterations which can give biological insight into cancer processes. Using an array-based high density comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) screen, genomic aberrations within 25 ACC patients were assessed to identify genomic characteristic of this cancer. Genomes were queried with >44,000 probes on the Agilent Human Genome CGH array detecting regions of chromosomal gain and loss within the tumor population. Statistical analysis of this genetic landscape reveals a set of chromosomal aberrations strongly associated with survival in an accumulation dependent fashion. These regions may hold prognostic indicators and offer therapeutic targets that can be used to develop novel treatments for aggressive tumors. Keywords: CGH, adrenocortical carcinoma, cancer Array-based high density comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) screen was utilized to identify genomic aberrations within 25 ACC patients. Thirteen tumor samples are from male and 12 are from female patients. The mean age of patients is 51.8 years (range, 23.3-77.7 years) with a median of 54.2 years. The mean tumor physical measurements for the ACC set are a mean weight of 536.3 grams (range, 20.5-2880 grams) and size of 10.7 cm (range, 3-21.5 cm). The clinical data also includes functional status of the tumor which is based on clinical parameters and confirmed by biochemical analysis. Nonfunctional tumors or those that do not over-produce hormones represent 48% of the tumor set. The localization of each tumor is a measure of the tumor metastatic characteristic at time of operation while tumor grade is a histologically based rating system for tumor progression. Sixty percent of the tumors (15 of 25) were localized to the adrenal area with no indication of metastatic spread. The majority of tumors were grade 3 and 4 at time of diagnosis (17 of 25) indicating necrosis and atypical mitosis of >21/50 hpf. Genomes were queried with >44,000 probes on the Agilent Human Genome CGH array detecting regions of chromosomal gain and loss within the tumor population.