Differential Expression of Neuronal Genes Defines Subtypes Of
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Imaging, Diagnosis, Prognosis Differential Expression of Neuronal Genes Defines Subtypes of Disseminated Neuroblastoma with Favorable and Unfavorable Outcome Matthias Fischer,1Andre¤ Oberthuer,1Benedikt Brors,3 Yvonne Kahlert,1Matthias Skowron,1 Harald Voth,1PatrickWarnat,3 Karen Ernestus,1, 2 Barbara Hero,1and Frank Berthold1 Abstract Purpose: Identification of molecular characteristics of spontaneously regressing stage IVS and progressing stage IV neuroblastoma to improve discrimination of patients with metastatic disease following favorable and unfavorable clinical courses. Experimental Design: Serial analysis of gene expression profiles were generated from five stage IVS and three stage IV neuroblastoma. Differential expression of candidate genes was evaluated by real-time quantitative reverse transcription-PCR in 76 pretreatment tumor samples (stage IVS n = 27 and stage IV n = 49). Gene expression-based outcome prediction was deter- mined by Prediction Analysis for Microarrays using 38 tumors as a training set and 38 tumors as a test set. Results: Comparison of serial analysis of gene expression profiles from stage IV and IVS neuro- blastoma revealed f500 differentially expressed transcripts. Genes related to neuronal differen- tiation were observed more frequently in stage IVS tumors as determined by associating transcripts to Gene Ontology annotations. Forty-one candidate genes were evaluated by quanti- tative reverse transcription-PCR and18 were confirmed to be differentially expressed (P V 0.001). Classification of patients according to expression patterns of these 18 genes using Prediction Analysis for Microarrays discriminated two subgroups with significantly differing event-free survival (96 F 6% versus 40 F 8% at 3 years; P < 0.0001) and overall survival (100% versus 72 F 7% at 3 years; P = 0.0003). This classifier was the only independent covariate marker in a multivariate analysis considering the variables stage, age, MYCN amplification, and gene signature. Conclusions: Spontaneously regressing and progressing metastatic neuroblastoma differ by specific gene expression patterns, indicating distinct levels of neuronal differentiation and allow- ing for an improved risk estimation of children with disseminated disease. Neuroblastoma is a malignant embryonal tumor of the regression to fatal tumor progression. These contrasting courses sympathetic nervous system accounting for 7% to 8% of of disease may even occur in patients with disseminated childhood cancers. The biological and clinical behavior of the neuroblastoma: Whereas most metastatic tumors of children tumor is remarkably variable ranging from spontaneous at stage IVare characterized by aggressive growth and many patients succumb to their disease despite intensive treatment, those defined as stage IVS (age V12 months and dissemination restricted to liver, bone marrow, and/or skin) regularly show 1 Authors’ Affiliations: Department of Pediatric Oncology and Hematology and spontaneous regression resulting in an excellent patient’s Center of Molecular Medicine Cologne, University Children’s Hospital; 2Department of Pathology, University Hospital, Cologne, Germany; and outcome (1, 2). Although survival rates of stage IVand IVS 3Department of Theoretical Bioinformatics, German Cancer Research Center, patients differ markedly, the precise delineation of a regressive Heidelberg, Germany phenotype remains challenging, and markers, such as age V12 Received 4/21/06; revised 6/13/06; accepted 6/23/06. months and metastatic pattern, are still a matter of debate (3, 4). Grant support: Deutsche Krebshilfe grant 50-2719, Bundesministerium fu« r Bildung und Forschung through the National Genome Research Network 2 grants However, because treatment strategies of these patients may vary 01GS0456 and 01GR0450, Competence Network Pediatric Oncology and from a ‘‘watch and wait’’ approach to myeloablative mega- Hematology, and Fo« rdergesellschaft Kinderkrebs-Neuroblastom-Forschung e.V. therapy with autologous stem-cell rescue, precise risk group The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page assignment is critical for therapeutic decisions. charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance The molecular mechanisms underlying the process of with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact. Note: Supplementary data for this article are available at Clinical Cancer Research spontaneous regression are still unknown. Whereas some Online (http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/). authors postulated that natural immunologic tumor defense Requests for reprints: Matthias Fischer, Department of Pediatric Oncology and mechanisms could account for this phenomenon (5, 6), others Hematology, University Children’s Hospital, Kerpener Str. 62, 50924 Cologne, suggested that spontaneous involution of the tumor might be Germany. Phone: 49-221-478-6816; Fax: 49-221-478-4689; E-mail: matthias. [email protected]. a result of developmentally regulated programmed cell death F 2006 American Association for Cancer Research. of neuroblasts (1, 7–10). Current models of neuroblastoma doi:10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-06-0985 tumorigenesis propose that there are at least two distinct Clin Cancer Res 2006;12(17) September 1, 2006 5118 www.aacrjournals.org Downloaded from clincancerres.aacrjournals.org on October 2, 2021. © 2006 American Association for Cancer Research. Gene Expression Patterns of Metastatic Neuroblastoma subtypes of neuroblastoma differing in their tumor cell biology (15). In brief, 5 Ag total RNA was converted into first-strand cDNA in a (9), one with the ability to regress or differentiate spontane- volume of 52.5 AL. PCR amplification was done using standard A A ously and the other showing an aggressive phenotype. These conditions in a volume of 30 L containing 0.4 L of 1:10 diluted first- A Â two subtypes have been shown to differ from one another by strand cDNA, 26.8 Lof1 SYBR Green PCR Master Mix (Applied Biosystems), and 1.4 ALof2.5Amol/L forward and reverse primer each several cytogenetic aberrations, such as MYCN amplification (Eurogentec, Seraing, Belgium). Primer sequences are available from the and deletions of the chromosomal regions 1p, 3p, and 11q authors on request. Serial cDNA dilutions of the neuroblastoma cell line (del1p, del3p, and del11q), all of which are associated with IMR-32 were used for standard curve calculation. Target gene expression poor outcome (1, 2), and more recently by distinctive gene levels were normalized to the geometric mean of transcript levels of the expression signatures with strong prognostic effect (11, 12). control genes SDHA and HPRT1, which have been shown to be However, tumors of stage IVS disease were either absent or consistently expressed in stage IVand IVSneuroblastoma (15), and represented in minor numbers in the latter studies, and efforts calibrated to the minimal expression value within the total set of tumors. of other studies to identify characteristic gene expression Data analysis and statistics. SAGE profiles of stage IVand IVS t patterns of stage IVS tumors in comparison with stage IV neuroblastoma were compared using test statistics, ANOVA, and neuroblastoma failed thus far (13, 14). Fisher’s exact test with Bonferroni correction. Calculations were carried out in R (version 2.1.0, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing; In this study, gene expression patterns of stage IVand IVS http://www.r-project.org). To identify GO categories (http://www. tumors were investigated using serial analysis of gene expres- geneontology.org) overrepresented in the tumor subtypes, the UniGene sion (SAGE) and quantitative reverse transcription-PCR IDs were mapped to the Locus Link/Entrez entries. Associated GO (QPCR) to uncover transcripts related to spontaneous regres- categories were obtained from the Bioconductor (16) library human- sion and progression of disseminated neuroblastoma. Differ- LLmappings (version 1.10.0). Only GO categories in the ‘‘biological entially expressed transcripts were associated to Gene Ontology process’’ section of GO were used. Overrepresentation of GO categories (GO) annotations to identify potential biological processes was tested by using the hypergeometric test implemented in the occurring within the transcriptome of spontaneously regressing Bioconductor package GOstats (version 1.4.0). Distributions of metastatic neuroblastoma. Finally, a supervised class prediction normalized gene expression levels determined by QPCR in stage IV U analysis was done to evaluate the prognostic effect of the and IVS tumors were compared using the Mann-Whitney test. For supervised class prediction analysis, the nearest shrunken centroids identified candidate genes. method [Prediction Analysis for Microarrays (PAM)] was applied (17) after expression data had been transformed by calculating the log ratio Materials and Methods of expression values to the median expression value of each gene. The implementation in the Bioconductor package pamr (version 1.25) was Characteristics of patients and tumor samples. A total of 76 used. To consider all the information from the QPCR data, the PAM 10- pretreatment tumor samples from patients with disseminated neuro- fold cross-validation of the training set was done with a fixed threshold blastoma were obtained from the German tumor tissue bank (stage IV of zero for no shrinkage, thereby estimating the classification accuracy n = 49 and stage IVS n = 27), 8 of which were used for gene expression of the gene signature