Gene amplification of the transcription factor DP1 and the CTNND1 in human lung cancer

The search for novel oncogenes is important because these could be the target of future specific anticancer therapies. In the present work, we report the identification of novel amplified genes in lung cancer. In order to find out novel amplified genes in lung cancer, we aligned the gene expression data of 69 human lung tumors according to the position of transcripts in the human genome and searched for clusters of overexpressed genes. We found a cluster in chromosomes 13q34 and 11q12 with gene overexpression in four of these tumors. Then, we performed FISH analysis in these amplicons, which clearly evidenced the presence of high level copy number in these chromosomal regions. We performed SNP arrays-based in the tumors that carried gene amplification. The results clearly evidenced the presence of a high level copy number amplicon in these specimens. We determined the genomic copy number profile of four squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) tumours using a SNP array, the Illumina Infinium HumanOmni1-Quad BeadChip.