Application of Serial Analysis of Gene Expression in Cancer Research

It is now widely believed that tumors originate from normal cells as a result of accumulated genetic/epigenetic changes. These alterations affect the signaling pathways at transcriptional and post-transcriptional level that drive cells into uncontrolled cell division, growth, and migration. Recent advancement of molecular technologies have yielded comprehensive gene expression profiling techniques that have successfully provided candidate diagnostic and prognostic markers in human cancers. Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) is a technology to facilitate the measurement of mRNA transcripts of normal and malignant tissues in a non-biased and highly accurate and quantitative manner. SAGE produces a comprehensive gene expression portrait without a priori gene sequence information, leading to the identification of novel transcripts potentially involved in the pathogenesis of human cancer. In this review, we provide a brief outline of SAGE to underscore the advantages of the method relative to the other gene expression profiling approaches in cancer research. We also summarize the progression of recent gene expression profiling studies and discuss the current topics of SAGE analysis in cancer research for the development of novel therapeutic interventions.