Development of a Predictor for Human Brain Tumors Based on Gene Expression Values Obtained from Two Types of Microarray Technologies

Development of molecular diagnostics that can reliably differentiate amongst different subtypes of brain tumors is an important unmet clinical need in postgenomics medicine and clinical oncology. A simple linear formula derived from gene expression values of four genes (GFAP, PTPRZ1, GPM6B, and PRELP) measured from cDNA microarrays (n = 35) have distinguished glioblastoma and meningioma cases in a previous study. We herein extend this work further and report that the above predictor formula showed its robustness when applied to Affymetrix microarray data acquired prospectively in our laboratory (n = 80) as well as publicly available data (n = 98). Importantly, GFAP and GPM6B were both retained as being significant in the predictive model upon using the Affymetrix data obtained in our laboratory, whereas the other two predictor genes were SFRP2 and SLC6A2. These results collectively indicate the importance of the expression values of GFAP and GPM6B genes sampled from the two types of microarray technologies tested. The high prediction accuracy obtained in these instances demonstrates the robustness of the predictors across microarray platforms used. This result would require further validation with a larger population of meningioma and glioblastoma cases. At any rate, this study paves the way for further application of gene signatures to more stringent biopsy discrimination challenges.