Technical considerations for analyzing EMT–MET data from surgical samples

With an increase of neoadjuvant therapy, biopsy samples have become imperative for cancer research; however, what kind of difference between surgical and endoscopic biopsy samples in gene expression profiles was still unclear. Recently, we reported artificially induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition (aiEMT) in the surgical samples by comparison between gene expression profiles of both samples of the esophagus. This was also found in mouse epithelium under an ischemic condition for 4 h. This study will evoke underestimation of the prognostic evaluation power of EMT related markers in past cancer research and prevalence of biopsy samples for in vivo expression profiling with low biases.