Expression-based identification of OHNC genomic changes

口腔癌/头颈癌（OHNC）是全球第六大常见癌症。在美国，每年大约有38,000例新的口腔癌病例被诊断出来。像大多数人类癌症一样，口腔癌/头颈癌的特征是染色体改变。DNA微阵列的出现产生了大量与各种疾病状态相关的基因表达动态数据，但相对而言，很少有研究确定可能导致这些表达变化的染色体结构异常。目前的研究旨在开发一个易于使用的统计框架，以识别基于广泛可用的基因表达数据的染色体改变。具体而言，这些研究旨在：1)绘制异常染色体内结构插入或缺失的边界；2)鉴定基因表达空间组织异常的染色体；3)利用临床基因表达数据发现口腔/头颈癌的染色体改变。这些研究将为基于我们最近开发的基于基因表达数据识别染色体断点的统计技术绘制染色体异常提供一个全面和临床有用的框架。除了开放档案表达数据进行结构分析外，这些技术还可以提供数据分析的“增值”层，以指定输入的基因表达数据，以便通过荧光原位杂交（FISH）、杂合缺失（LOH）或比较基因组杂交（CGH）更直接地分析染色体异常。

Oral/head and neck cancer (OHNC) is the 6th most common cancer worldwide. Approximately 38,000 new cases of oral cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Like most human cancers, oral/head and neck cancer is characterized by chromosomal alterations. The advent of DNA microarrays has produced a massive corpus of data on gene expression dynamics associated with various disease states, but comparatively little research has been done to identify chromosomal structural abnormalities that might underlie those expression changes. The present studies seek to develop an easily usable statistical framework for identifying chromosomal alterations based on widely available gene expression data. Specifically, these studies seek to: AIM 1) Map the boundaries of structural insertions or deletions within an abnormal chromosome AIM 2) Identify chromosomes showing spatially organized abnormalities in gene expression AIM 3) Discover chromosomal alterations in oral/head and neck cancer using clinical gene expression data. These studies will provide a comprehensive and clinically useful framework for mapping chromosomal abnormalities based on statistical techniques we have recently developed to identify chromosomal break points based on gene expression data. In addition to opening archival expression data to structural analysis, these techniques can provide a "value-added" layer of data analysis to nominate incoming gene expression data for more direct analyses of chromosomal abnormality through fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), loss of heterozygosity (LOH), or comparative genomic hybridization (CGH).