In the 21st century, cancer research,
integrated with biology, genetics, cytology and statistics, continues to be a
hot spot. Since last century, many researchers have
been working in this field on clinical observations and theoretical deduction.
Among many researches, generic aspects of such, a relatively new method for
learning causes and preventions for cancer, have begun to show its potential. Over
the past decades, large-scale research projects have been launched but faced
certain challenges.
Researchers often
have to deal with tens of thousands of genes with a relatively small sample
size of patient cases—a dilemma referred to as the “Curse of Dimensionality”—and
it makes it hard to learn the data well because of relatively sparse data in
high dimensional space. To deal with the dilemma, this study used p-values of
individual genes for pathway enrichment to find statistically significant
pathways. The aim of this study was to find significant genes and biological
pathways that were related to lung cancer by statistical method and pathway
enrichment analysis.
The dataset was retrieved from Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA),
which collected data in collaboration with National Cancer Institute, National
Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences etc.
Normalized RNA sequencing data of 868 lung cancer patients was studied
statistically with patients’ clinical observations. Two specific clinical data,
recurrence free survival (RFS) and whether the patient has a new tumor event
after initial treatment (cancer recurrence), were chosen to run regression on. The
two major statistical methods, linear regression and logistic regression, were used
in this paper. And gene set pathway enrichment analysis was also used.
The results showed that
several significant genes, such as WNT2B, VAV2, and significant pathways, such
as Metabolism of xenobiotics by cytochrome P450-Homo sapiens (human) and Fatty
acid degradation-Homo sapiens (human), were found to be both statistically
significant and biological studies supported. Significant genes, includingTESK2,
C5orf43, and ZSCAN21, and significant pathways such as Pentose and glucoronate
interconversions-Homo sapiens (human), were found to be new cancer-related
genes and pathways.
Overall, this study is one of the many steps that human take to
understand and finally defeat cancer. As more advanced developments occur in
statistics, biology and genetics, a world without cancer approaches steadily.
Article by Yuhang
Wu, from Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, MI, USA.
Full access: http://suo.im/4SwHc5
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