A gene signature to determine metastatic behavior in thymic carcinoma.

7605 Background: Thymomas and thymic carcinomas (TC) are rare epithelial tumors derived from the thymic gland in the anterior mediastinum. Although all histological types of thymomas, albeit with different frequencies, can give rise to metastases, TC have a more aggressive behavior and metastasize earlier and more frequently than thymomas. We previously developed a prognostic gene signature able to accurately determine metastatic behavior of thymomas (Gokmen-Polar et al. ASCO 2012). The signature is currently used in clinical practice to identify patients at high or low risk for metastatic disease. In the current study, we sought to evaluate the utility of this signature for determining risk from TC tumors. Methods: FFPE tissue sections were macrodissected from 35 primary TC. RNA was isolated and RT-PCR was performed to assess the expression of 23 genes (19 test and four reference genes). Predictive modeling was performed using Radial Basis Machine (RBM) software from JMP Genomics (SAS), and survival anal...