Ann Arbor-based Compendia Bioscience Inc., a provider of cancer profiling data and analysis tools, Tuesday announced the central role of their flagship product Oncomine in the discovery and identification of a gene, called SPINK1, as a key new therapeutic target and biomarker for prostate cancer.
Oncomine is a rapidly growing compendium of nearly 26,000 gene expression and DNA copy number arrays coupled with analysis functions and a Web application for data mining and visualization. Comprised of thousands of samples representing every major type of cancer, Oncomine exploits this data for therapeutic target discovery, validation, and prioritization.
Compendia CEO Daniel R. Rhodes, in his continued role as a research investigator at the University of Michigan, led the Oncomine analysis that identified SPINK1 as a candidate oncogene in prostate cancer.
Back in 2005, the UM team discovered in a certain set of genes a rearrangement at the chromosome level that they believe causes 60 to 70 percent of prostate cancers. The condition is called ETS-family gene fusions.
"That made news in the scientific community," said John Freshley, chief business officer at Oncomine. "Then the question became, what about the prostate cancers that don't show these gene fusions. Today's release answered part of that question... We found something else unusual."
Oncomine analysis showed that SPINK1 over-expression was mutually exclusive with ETS-family gene fusions -- and also wasn't present in normal prostate tissue. "So we were pretty sure we had found something important," Rhodes said.
Published in the current edition of the medical journal Cancer Cell, this study shows that SPINK1 is detectable in the urine and that SPINK1-positive prostate cancers are a particularly aggressive molecular subset of prostate cancer with SPINK1 having a role in cancer invasion.
The analysis approach used to identify SPINK1 has been named Meta-COPA and will soon become a standard feature within the Oncomine platform. In the interim, Compendia Bioscience will provide scientific services to answer customers' key research questions requiring Meta-COPA or other analyses not currently addressable through the Oncomine user interface.
More at www.compendiabio.com.
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