This Week in the Journal of Clinical Pathology

Carlos Gómez-Martin at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center and his colleagues write in the Journal of Clinical Pathology that HER2 gene amplification is associated with gastric cancer patient survival. They examined HER2 gene amplification and overexpression in tumor samples from 148 gastric cancer patients and correlated that data with patient characteristics. That HER2 amplification correlated with patient survival suggests that "HER2 gene amplification approaches might be an optimal HER2/neu testing strategy for the selection of HER2+ GC patients who are candidates to be treated with anti-HER2 therapies," Gómez-Martin et al. write.

Also in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, researchers led by Ki-Seok Jang from South Korea's Hanyang University report that the loss of SIRT1 histone deacetylase expression is associated with colorectal adenocarcinoma tumor progression. Jang and his colleagues found that normal mucosa expressed SIRT1, while about 80 percent of adenomatous polyps, around 40 percent of colorectal adenocarcinoma, and about 35 percent of metastatic tissue expressed SIRT1. "SIRT1 expression decreases stepwise during colorectal carcinogenesis ... and as a function of adverse prognostic factors such as regional LN metastasis and tumor stage," the researchers write. "Our data also suggest that loss of SIRT1 is associated with the MSI [microsatellite instability]-high phenotype."