Genetic 'fingerprint' shown to predict liver cancer's return
Scientists have reached a critical milestone in the study of liver cancer that lays the groundwork for predicting the illness's path, whether toward cure or recurrence. By analyzing the tissue in and around liver tumors, an international research team has identified a kind of genetic "fingerprint" that can help predict if patients' cancers will return. The findings appear in the October 15 advance online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and were made possible by a large-scale method for revealing genes' activity, which the researchers show can be applied to tissues that have been chemically preserved instead of frozen. This technical triumph promises to unlock biological information within millions of clinical samples previously intractable to genomic study.