11. To investigate if transcription levels of these 6 genes are representative o
ID: 3064020 • Letter: 1
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11. To investigate if transcription levels of these 6 genes are representative of everyone with lung cancer, microarray analysis was performed using a set of 12 patients. Correlations were calculated between each pair of patient samples and a clustering algorithm program showed a group of 5 patients were highly similar to each other. A group of three other patients were highly similar to each other but dissimilar from the first group of five If all lung cancers fall into these two categories of gene expression patterns, what does this tell you about the single discase we call lung cancer? (1.5pt) a. How might you use this information to improve cancer patient diagnosis and treatment in the future? (1.5pt) b. 64Explanation / Answer
a. If all the lung cancers fall into only these two categories, we can conclude that there are distinct 2 types of lung cancers, each of which has its unique characteristics starkly different from the other category.
b. First, we must identify the key characterisitcs that uniquely identifies one category of the lung cancer from the other. After this is done, next time onwards, whenever a potential lung cancer patient arrives, we must examine that person's symptom characteristics for these key characteristics of each category and assign the person to one of the two categories. Because of this, we can also make targetted treatment plans for each category of lung cancer patients and also allocate our resources (eg. Speciality doctors for each type, paramedical staff etc) efficiently in this manner. This way diagnosis and treatment can be improved.
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