Description
Gastric cancer can be divided in two major histological subtypes: diffuse and intestinal-type adenocarcinomas. Since both types diverge in many clinical and molecular characteristics, is widely accepted that both represent distinct disease entities that may benefit from different therapeutic approaches. The diffuse type is explicitly more invasive and affected patients possess extremely poor prognosis. Gene expression profiling studies identified numerous genes with differences in mRNA expression between the two types. However, little overlap of published gene lists exists forcing the need for further and more comprehensive analyses.