The Relationship between Single Nucleotide Polymorphism of ERCC1 Gene and the Response to Platinum Based Chemotherapy in Egyptian Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients

Abstract

Abstract Background Lung cancer (LC) is the second most common cancer diagnosed in both males and females. There are two subtypes of LC. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the major one. Treatment options for NSCLC depends mainly on the stage at diagnosis. The majority of the patients are diagnosed at advanced stages at time of presentation. Therefore, chemotherapy and radiotherapy play the dominant role in treatment of advanced NSCLC. The most commonly used chemotherapy is platinum-based chemotherapy as cisplatin and carboplatin and third generation drugs as vinorelbine and gemcitabine. The efficacy of platinum-based chemotherapy is limited by chemoresistance. The excision repair cross complementation group 1(ERCC1) gene is a member of nucleotide excision repair pathway that plays a critical role in the DNA repair by removing DNA covalent helix-distorting adducts. Aim of the Work In this study investigated the relationship between single nucleotide polymorphism of ERCC1 rs11615 and the response to platinum-based chemotherapy in Egyptian NSCLC patients in order to prevent the non-necessary exposure to the toxic effect of chemotherapy. Patients and Methods This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 50 NSCLC patients who were recruited from the Oncology Clinic in Ain Shams University Hospitals; twenty of them were responders to platinumbased chemotherapy and the other 30 were non-responders according to RECIST criteria. All subjects underwent full medical history focusing on tobacco smoking and family history of cancers, thorough clinical examination, histological diagnosis of NSCLC and TNM classification, radiological studies: computed tomography of chest and abdomen and laboratory investigations in the form of: complete blood picture (CBC), liver function tests and kidney function tests. Detection of the ERCC1 (T/C) polymorphism by realtime PCR was done for both the responders' and the non-responders' groups. Results There was no significant statistical difference observed between the responders’ and nonresponders’ groups regarding the genotype frequencies nor the allelic frequency (p > 0.05). Conclusion The present study did not confirm the presence of significant association between the genotypic frequencies nor the allelic frequencies of the ERCC1 rs 11615 among the responders' and the non-responders' groups. Further studies with higher sample size are needed to clarify the association.