Ann Thorac Surg 2000;70:405-406
© 2000 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Invited commentary
Invited commentary
David H. Harpole, Jr, MD
Division of Thoracic Surgery, Duke University Medical Center, DUMC-3617, Durham, NC 27710, USA,
e-mail: harpo002{at}mc.duke.edu
Invited commentary
Doctor Arinaga and colleagues provide an elegant basic science translational research study. Much has been learned through molecular biology about carcinogenesis and pathways of resistance to chemotherapy and subsequent apoptotic cellular death by lung tumors over the last ten years. Interest has centered around methods with which the tumors preserve and elongate the telomere which cap each arm of the eukaryotic chromosomes. Dr Arinaga’s team, using RT-PCR on frozen lung tumor specimens (n = 92) resected during the last few years, sought to measure the three active components of the human telomerase complex: hTERC (an RNA component which acts as a template for telomerase extension), TEP1 (telomerase associated protein), and hTERT (the human telomerase catalytic subunit) which appears to be the most important subunit and have shown in cell culture assays to correlate with telomeric repeat amplification protocols (TRAP) assays which is a way of indirectly measuring telomerase activity. Ann Thorac Surg 2000;70:406
Doctor Arinaga and his associates used RT-PCR to measure the three subunit telomerase and found only hTERT to be expressed in the majority of tumors (> 80%) and not in the non-neoplastic lung tissue. On a subset of 15 patients, they compared the results of RT-PCR with the TRAP functional assay and found that there was a reasonable correlation between hTERT expression in telomerase activity while nothing could be stated from the other subunits.
In summary, this elegant study validated previous data in the literature on cell culture with results from tumors and normal lung in patients with lung cancer. It appears that telomerase activity plays an important role in patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer and the detection of hTERT may be a useful test for early detection of lung cancer and may in the future be a biologic pathway which could be blocked thereby stimulating apoptosis in tumors. It is important that the thoracic surgeon have a basic understanding of molecular biologic techniques, so that as these are entering the clinical arena, meaningful decisions can be made in translating basic science into clinical medicine.
Related Article
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Expression of human telomerase subunit genes in primary lung cancer and its clinical significance
- Mitsuyuki Arinaga, Shigeki Shimizu, Kunihiko Gotoh, Nobuhiro Haruki, Takao Takahashi, Takashi Takahashi, and Tetsuya Mitsudomi
Ann. Thorac. Surg. 2000 70: 401-405.
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