Novel scoring scheme helps predict cancer’s ability to spread

SINGAPORE — New treatments to suppress metastasis in cancer patients may now be explored, after scientists here have developed a novel scoring scheme that predicts the ability of cancer cells to spread to other parts of the body.

The scoring system monitors the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) mechanism, which plays a role in many cancer-related events, including cancer invasion, metastasis and chemoresistance.

During the EMT process, tumour cells gain the ability to move from the primary tumour site to a secondary one.

In their study, the researchers — led by Professor Jean Paul Thiery, senior principal investigator, and Dr RubyHuang, principal associate at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore — used 13,000 samples from databases containing gene-expression information for more than 15 different types of cancers.

They established a computational modelling scheme and tumours were scored to reflect their ability to move and spread.

Patients with tumours that had higher scores are at greater risk of poor outcomes than those with tumours that had lower scores, where cells stay in tight contact.

Cancer metastasis is responsible for 90 per cent of cancer deaths.

Researchers then used this scoring scheme to establish an EMT spectrum across various cancers and noted a good correlation between cancer cell lines and tumours.

“The scoring works not only on tumours for patients, but also for cancer cell lines, used in research labs. This means the application can help researchers and clinicians,” said Dr Huang.

The scientists concluded that the scoring scheme might enable the investigation of EMT in cancer progression, survival and throughout the clinical response to therapy. The findings were published in EMBO Molecular Medicine in September.

Dr Huang said: “After announcing this generic EMT scoring scheme at an international cancer meeting in the United States, people came to me and thanked us for providing the field with a useful tool to help them determine EMT.

“Now, researchers no longer need to scratch their heads to find out what markers to use to represent EMT in their systems. We have provided the solution.”

Said Prof Thiery, who was a pioneer in 2002 in indicating the role of EMT during cancer progression: “It’s about time someone developed an EMT scoring scheme and we are very happy and excited that it came from our team.”

The scoring scheme has generated interest from the scientific community and the team has started to compute EMT scoring for other researchers upon request.

Currently, the team is developing a simplified diagnostic test to allow research or clinical labs to assess the EMT status of research or clinical samples.