Integrated genome-wide analysis of gene dosage and gene expression in Non Small Cell Lung Cancer

Understanding the molecular events in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is essential to improve early diagnosis and treatment for this disease. We examined the effect of chromosomal copy number changes on gene expression in resected NSCLC patients. We identified a deletion on 14q32.2-33 as a common alteration in NSCLC (44%), which significantly influenced gene expression for HSP90AA1, residing on 14q32. This deletion was correlated with better overall and recurrence free survival (P=0.008 and P=0.004, respectively) and survival was also longer in patients whose tumors had low expression levels of HSP90AA1. We extended the analysis to an independent validation set of 140 resected NSCLC patients, and confirmed low HSP90AA1 expression to be significantly related with overall survival and recurrence free survival (P=0.003 and P=0.007, respectively). In vitro treatment with an HSP90 inhibitor had potent antiproliferative activity in NSCLC cell lines. We suggest that targeting HSP90 will have clinical impact for NSCLC patients. Keywords: Array CGH gene expression integration Array CGH and gene expression arrays (data available via array express accession: 0000) were performed on 32 radically resected tumor samples from stage I and II NSCLC patients. An integrative analysis tool ACE-it was applied to determine whether chromosomal copy number affects gene expression.