Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common type of cancer that develops in bone. Like the osteoblasts in normal bone, the cells that form this cancer make bone matrix. But the bone matrix of an osteosarcoma is not as strong as that of normal bones. Specifically, it is an aggressive malignant neoplasm that arises from primitive transformed cells of mesenchymal origin –being so a sarcoma– and that exhibits osteoblastic differentiation and produces malignant osteoid.
Most osteosarcomas occur in children and young adults. Teens are the most commonly affected age group, but osteosarcoma can occur at any age. In this way, osteosarcoma is the most prevalent solid tumor in children and adolescents and it is frequent that the primary tumors suffer a second transformation to provoke metastases. In the case of osteosarcoma, lung metastases remain one of the factors associated with a dismal prognosis. At present, the genetic determinants driving pulmonary metastasis are poorly understood. We undertook a novel strategy using robust filtering analysis of transcriptomic profiling in tumor chemonaive osteoblastic populations derived from human primary tumors displaying extreme phenotypes (indolent vs metastatic) to uncover predictors associated with metastasis and poor survival.
In this webpage we include the raw data from the high-density expression microarrays of a series of primary tumor samples corresponding to osteosarcoma patients that later in time did metastasis to lung and patients that over similar time records did not suffer metastasis.
The full dataset (21 samples) can be downloaded here: