Induction Chemotherapy For Stage 4 Gastric Cancer And Prognostic Molecular Markers

The prognosis of gastric cancer with distant metastasis is very poor. Improvement of chemotherapy and investigation of molecular markers are required. We investigated the characteristics and the prognosis of patients with stage 4 gastric cancer with peritoneal or other distant metastases. 132 patients with stage 4 gastric carcinoma in Kitano hospital in between 2002 and 2009 were evaluated. The prognosis of the patients treated without chemotherapy was very poor. The prognosis of the patients with one factor of stage 4 was better than those with multiple factors. We tried induction chemotherapy with S-1 plus cisplatin for the patients without gastric bleeding or malignant gastric outlet obstruction. Our retrospective analysis demonstrated that induction chemotherapy improved the prognosis compared with adjuvant chemotheray after gastrectomy. In order to develop molecular markers for chemotherapeutic efficacy for advanced gastric cancer, we investigated the gene expression in the gastric carcinoma before treatment. We identified novel markers of gastric cancer using focused microarray analysis, hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase 1 (HPRT1) and transforming growth factor-alpha (TGF-α), low gene expression of which was associated with less malignant potential. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2011 Apr 2-6; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2011;71(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 3213. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2011-3213