New way to read genes in old samples

NEW YORK, May 28 (UPI) -- A new technique allows analysis of U.S. and Swedish cancer samples from trials going back to the l970s.

The innovation has been part of research into prostate cancer by Dr. Mark Rubin, now of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Todd Golub and other members of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

"The technological achievement of using fixed samples that were up to 30 years old is significant," Rubin said in a statement. "These (prostate) samples were placed in fixative and not frozen, so we needed new methods of retrieving the genetic information."

The research team including Dr. Sunita Setlur and Dr. Kirsten Mertz and others at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston developed a way to read gene transcription profiles hidden in old samples and amassed information on more than 6,000 genes.

"In the future, we hope to explore banked tissues from clinical trials to help understand why they failed," Rubin said.

The findings, which could have implications for prostate cancer research, including drug development, have been published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.