Pretreatment transcriptional profiling for predicting response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in rectal adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Purpose: Patients presenting with locally advanced rectal cancer currently receive preoperative radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy. Although pathologic complete response is achieved for approximately 10% to 30% of patients, a proportion of patients derive no benefit from this therapy while being exposed to toxic side effects of treatment. Therefore, there is a strong need to identify patients who are unlikely to benefit from neoadjuvant therapy to help direct them toward alternate and ultimately more successful treatment options. Experimental Design: In this study, we obtained expression profiles from pretreatment biopsies for 51 rectal cancer patients. All patients underwent preopera..