Concepts from workshop and Q&A

Question 1

Future directions of cancer treatment

Answer 1

Protection against cancer

Earlier detection

Safer treatments

Turning cancer into a long term/ chronic but manageable disease

Question 2

Biomarkers in cancer, their use and specific example

Answer 2

Can be detected in blood, urine and sometimes breath.

Prostate cancer biomarker PSA

P16 often lost in cancer this could be a marker

Question 3

Microarrays overview

Answer 3

• measurement of gene expression by mRNA abundance
• A way of globally looking at gene expression
• link between genomics and proteomics

Question 4

Uses of microarrays in cancer

Answer 4

• Determination of expression levels of genes
• Identification of sequence (gene mutation)
• Distinguish between normal and malignant tissue
• Define histopathology and prognosis
• In future may be able to predict response to chemotherapy

Question 5

Microarrays could lead to what treatment

Answer 5

Personalised, tailor made therapies

Question 6

What is a brief overview of microarrays method?

Answer 6

Determining the level at which a certain gene is expressed

• use of immobilised DNA-cDNA
• use of a hybridising probe, flood it with cDNA derived from mRNA from normal and malignant tissue. These will show up as different colours.
• if disease causes overexpression of the gene more sample cDNA will bind and flourescent red

Question 7

Summary of microarrays

Answer 7

Microarrays could be there to give us a good profile as to which genes have been up and down regulated, full profile of tumour

Question 8

Disadvantage of microarrays

Answer 8

• mRNA level doesn’t always correlate with protein function
• mRNA varies in stability and rate of translation
• Proteins are modified after translation
• can do protein microarrays