Pathway Activity Profiling

The OncoSIGNal portal supports an export function of OncoSIGNal test results to Excel that contains the Pathway Activity Profiling OncoSIGNal scores of multiple samples. The report export shows all sample information, flags, test status and OncoSIGNal scores with corresponding upper and lower confidence intervals. This report export will enable further data analysis or data visualization or the report can be adjusted and sorted to the user’s preference.

This example of the OncoSIGNal Report (generated by using the batch export option) shows how the pathway activity scores may be used in a retrospective study. The goal of the study was to investigate if OncoSIGNal can help to explain response to neo-adjuvant hormonal therapy; the retrospective study included patient samples of responders and non-responders to aromatase inhibitor (AI) treatment. Biopsy tissue from estrogen receptor (ER) IHC positive patients before start of neo-adjuvant and after neo-adjuvant AI treatment were measured. The largest differences in pathway activity can be observed for the ER pathway. In general, the relatively high ER pathway activity scores obtained from the pre-treatment samples decreased upon treatment, which might be an indication of successful AI treatment. Patient samples 102373 + 102374 however, show a relatively low pre-treatment ER activity score indicating a lower ER pathway activity before treatment, which may explain why this patient did not benefit from the AI treatment. Studying the pathway activity profile may provide further direction to identify relevant tumor driving pathways, such as the relatively high MAPK activity measured for patient samples 102373 + 102374 and relatively high PI3K activity for patient samples 102369 + 102370, respectively.