A Five-Gene Signature and Clinical Outcome in Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer

Current staging methods are inadequate for predicting the outcome of treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We developed a five-gene signature that is closely associated with survival of patients with NSCLC.

We used computer-generated random numbers to assign 185 frozen specimens for microarray analysis, real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis, or both. We studied gene expression in frozen specimens of lung-cancer tissue from 125 randomly selected patients who had undergone surgical resection of NSCLC and evaluated the association between the level of expression and survival. We used risk scores and decision-tree analysis to develop a gene-expression model for the prediction of the outcome of treatment of NSCLC. For validation, we used randomly assigned specimens from 60 other patients.