A cancer patient holds the IV tubes during chemotherapy.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(TIME.com) -- While more effective chemotherapy agents have improved cancer survival, not all patients benefit from the drugs.

Now, a team of researchers from Academia Sinica and the National Taiwan University College of Medicine say they have identified an eight gene "signature" that predicts how long cancer patients might survive without relapse after undergoing chemotherapy.

Predicting how well patients respond to chemotherapy drugs, the toxic agents that can decimate not just tumor cells but healthy ones as well, involves a complicated calculation of how active tumor genes are, how likely cancer cells are to spread to other sites, and how effective the chemotherapy drugs are in targeting and destroying abnormally growing cells.

To find the genetic markers in cancer cells that might provide clues to their response to chemotherapy, the researchers relied upon the the National Cancer Institute's panel of 60 human cancer cell lines, known as NCI-60, which represent leukemia, melanoma, lung, colon, ovarian, renal, breast and prostate cancers, among others.

From this panel, they identified 633 genes that were associated with a cancer cell's ability to spread, or invade other healthy tissues. They then compared how these genes reacted to 99 different anti-cancer drugs and found eight genes that showed a strong correlation to an elevated response to five chemotherapy agents -- dasatinib, docetaxel, erlotinib, everolimus and paclitaxel.

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The eight genes seemed to provide patients with a better chance of responding to chemotherapy, but to confirm the link, the researchers also turned to published studies of cancer patients to see if their panel could predict longer survival.

And indeed, lung and breast cancer patients in these trials with the eight gene signature showed a lower risk of recurrence and longer relapse-free survival than patients without the genetic markers.

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Genetic profile can predict post-chemo cancer survival

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