6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A099
MORPHOMETRIC QUANTITATION OF BRONCHIAL BIOPSIES AS INTERMEDIATE ENDPOINT BIOMARKERS FOR LUNG CANCER CHEMOPREVENTION
MacAulay C, Klein-Parker H, Leriche J, Gazdar A *, Guillaud M, Dawe C, Payne P, Korbelik J, Palcic B, Lam S

Cancer Imaging, BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada, * University of Texas, Dallas, USA

Recent advances in pulmonary imaging (LIFE) have made the detection and localization of early cancers and their precursors much more likely. The ability to localize and detect these lesions in subjects and follow specific sites over time gives one the opportunity to modify the early development of lung cancer by chemopreventive methods. The gold standard for determining a subject's status is the visual interpretation of biopsies. Given the reproducibility of visual pathology grading of bronchial biopsies, there exists a need to quantitate the observable morphometric changes. To this end, we used a quantitative microscopy system to quantitate the morphometric characteristics of bronchial biopsy sections to use as an intermediate biomarker. This methodology is described elsewhere at the conference. This intermediate biomarkers has been applied to several Sialor and Retinol chemoprevention studies. Additionally this biomarker enables one to correlate quantitative sputum cytology approaches with quantitative histological results. The intent is to use quantitative sputum cytology as an enrollment criteria for future chemoprevention and lung cancer management trials. Two different quantitative sputum cytology training methods which use different definitions of truth will be compared. Supported by NIH Grants #CN-45597-63 & #U01 CA 68381-01.