Colorectal cancer may develop slowly over years from precursor lesions, and thus screening combined with early diagnosis is the key to disease prevention. Recent studies have elucidated specific traits in the gut microbiome associated with colorectal cancer and suggested that the microbiome may be useful in screening for colorectal cancer purposes but failed to provide protocols that can be applied in a practical situation. A recent study by Zackular and colleagues, presented on page 1112, provides an important way forward here in showing that specific analysis of multiple aspects of the microbiome composition in toto provides reliable detection of both precancerous and cancerous lesions. This important achievement when combined with other noninvasive techniques promises to provide highly effective tools for early colorectal cancer diagnosis and its prevention. Cancer Prev Res; 7(11); 1108-11.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains a highly lethal disease, unusually resistant against therapy. It is generally felt that stratification of patients for personalized medicine is the way forward. Here, we report that a subpopulation of PDACs shows strong activation of the mTOR signaling cassette. Moreover, we show that inhibition of mTOR in pancreatic cancer cell lines showing high levels of mTOR signaling is associated with cancer cell death. Finally, we show using fine needle biopsies the existence of a subpopulation of PDAC patients with high activation of the mTOR signaling cassette and provide evidence that inhibition of mTOR might be clinically useful for this group. Thus, our results define an unrecognized subpopulation of PDACs, characterized by high activation of mTOR and show that identification of this specific patient group in the early phase of diagnosis is feasible.
Utomo, Sergey R Konstantinov, Marco J Bruno and Maikel P Peplenbosch. PCF fluid kindly was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.The copyright holder for this preprint (which . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/064550 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Aug. 9, 2016; 2 Gert-Jan Kremers and proteinase K was kindly provide by André Boonstra and Kim Kreefft was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
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