Question

66. You are deciding on a drug treatment for a patient with pancreatic cancer. You know that different drugs have different efficacies based on the nature of the specific type of tumor. You decide to identify the tumor type by transcriptional analysis.  What experiment would you do to perform this analysis?Your analysis shows upregulation of a cluster of cell cycle genes, glucose metabolism genes and receptor tyrosine kinase signaling genes.  Why do you suppose these 3 sets of genes would be upregulated? You decide to target the tyrosine kinase receptor signaling gene products for drug treatment.  Name 2 protein targets and whether the drug would increase or decrease the targets activity.

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Answer 1

The efficency of different drugs on a cancer tissue can be dependent on the type of tumor. Transcriptome analysis here helps to identify genes expressed in tumour cells and identify various intermediate proteins expressed based on them the type of tumour can be identified the quantification or relative study of marker protein's helps to understand which drug might be effective. Cell cycle genes are up regulated to increase the number of cell divisions in tumour cells, increase in genes involved in glucose metabolism indicates that the cancers cells dependent on glucose supply as the energy source. increase in tyrosine kinase genes indicated that the tumour induced due to altered tyrosine kinase pathway in such a way that it keeps the cells in continously proliferating state. This observation indicates that drugs targeted for one among the three pathways are might be effective against this tumour.