Digital karyotyping identifies thymidylate synthase amplification as a mechanism of resistance to 5-fluorouracil in metastatic colorectal cancer patients
- 17 February 2004
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 101 (9), 3089-3094
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0308716101
Abstract
Resistance to chemotherapy is a major cause of mortality in advanced cancer patients. In this study, digital karyotyping was used to search for genomic alterations in liver metastases that were clinically resistant to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). In two of four patients, we identified amplification of an approximately 100-kb region on 18p11.32 that was of particular interest because it contained the gene encoding thymidylate synthase (TYMS), a molecular target of 5-FU. Analysis of TYMS by fluorescence in situ hybridization identified TYMS gene amplification in 23% of 31 5-FU-treated cancers, whereas no amplification was observed in metastases of patients that had not been treated with 5-FU. Patients with metastases containing TYMS amplification had a substantially shorter median survival (329 days) than those without amplification (1,021 days, P <0.01). These data suggest that genetic amplification of TYMS is a major mechanism of 5-FU resistance in vivo and have important implications for the management of colorectal cancer patients with recurrent disease.This publication has 41 references indexed in Scilit:
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