A signature predicting poor prognosis in gastric and ovarian cancer represents a coordinated macrophage and stromal-response.

Genome wide mRNA expression profiling of 94 gastric tumours derived from Australian based cohort was performed. . From this data we identified a cluster of co-expressed genes termed the stromal response cluster which almost perfectly differentiates tumor from its non-malignant gastric tissue and hence can be regarded as a highly tumor-specific gene expression signature. We show that these genes are consistently co-expressed across a range of independent gastric datasets as well as other cancer types suggesting a conserved functional role in cancer.

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Busuttil RA, George J, Tothill RW, Ioculano K, Kowalczyk A, Mitchell C, Lade S, Tan P, Haviv I, Boussioutas A