Identification and Characterisation of the Cellular and Molecular Changes in Intestinal Metaplasia Associated with Progression to Gastric Cancer

Abstract

Gastric cancer (GC) patients are mainly asymptomatic and present at an advanced stage with a 5-year survival rate of only 20-30% in most countries. It is crucial to gain greater insight into the process of gastric carcinogenesis in order to develop tools that will allow improved patient stratification and targeted surveillance. The relationship between intestinal metaplasia (IM), a key premalignant lesion in gastric carcinogenesis, and the diffuse type of gastric cancer (DGC) was investigated using data mining of GC patient pathology reports and existing gene expression data. IM and DGC were shown to be associated both histologically and molecularly in a proportion of cases suggesting that ..