PARENT SESSION
1:30 PM to 3:30 PM
Sunday, April 21, 2002
Poster Session 5 Oxygenation of Tumors and Modification
Room: Nevada Exhibition Center
(P10-86) Hypoxia Marker Binding Predicts for Outcome in Cancer of the Cervix.
Aquino-Parsons, Christina1, Banath, Judit1, Raleigh, Jim2, Olive, Peggy*,1, 1 British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, B.C.2 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
ABSTRACT-
Low tumor oxygenation measured using oxygen microelectrodes is known to be predictive for poor outcome in cancer of the cervix. To determine whether the hypoxia marker, pimonidazole, would show a similar predictive ability, patients with invasive epithelial cervical cancers, FIGO stages Ib to IVa, were given pimonidazole hydrochloride as an i.v. infusion (0.5 gm/m2) 24 hours before tumor biopsy. Patients were subsequently treated with the current standard course of radiation and weekly cisplatinum. After incisional biopsy, a single cell suspension was prepared from approximately 100 mg tumor, and cells were fixed in 70% ethanol. Flow analysis of these samples was performed using anti-pimonidazole antibody, and histograms were analyzed using a curve fitting program that defined hypoxic cells as those that bound on average 10 times more pimonidazole antibody than the well-oxygenated cells of the tumor. In 68 tumor biopsies analyzed for pimonidazole binding, the percentage of hypoxic cells ranged from 0 to 23% with a mean of 5.9%. In 45 patients where follow-up time has now exceeded 1 year, none of the 8 patients with tumors containing less than 1.5% hypoxic cells has yet shown evidence of disease. However, local recurrence and/or metastases were observed in 25% of the remaining 37 patients. These results support the use of hypoxia markers to identify patients with cervical cancer that will respond well to treatment.
KEYWORDS: hypoxia marker, pimonidazole, cervix cancer