Abstract
Identifying cancer-specific biomarkers represents an ongoing challenge to the development of novel cancer diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic strategies. Cancer/testis (CT) genes are an important gene family with expression tightly restricted to the testis in normal individuals but which can also be activated in cancers. Here we develop a pipeline to identify new CT genes. We analysed and validated expression profiles of human meiotic genes in normal and cancerous tissue followed by meta-analyses of clinical data sets from a range of tumour types resulting in the identification of a large cohort of highly specific cancer biomarker genes, including the recombination hot spot activator
PRDM9
and the meiotic cohesin genes
SMC1beta
and
RAD21L
. These genes not only provide excellent cancer biomarkers for diagnostics and prognostics, but may serve as oncogenes and have excellent drug targeting potential.