Genetic association between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cancer

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease. An ALS drug, Riluzole, has been shown to induce two different anticancer effects on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In light of this finding, we explore the relationship between ALS and cancer, especially for HCC, from the molecular biological viewpoint. We establish biomarkers that can discriminate between ALS patients and healthy controls. A principal component analysis (PCA) based unsupervised feature extraction (FE) is used to find gene biomarkers of ALS based on microarray gene expression data. Based on this method, 101 probes were selected as biomarkers for ALS with 95% high accuracy to discriminate between ALS patients and controls. Most of the genes corresponding to these probes are shown to be related to various cancers. These findings might provide a new insight for developing new therapeutic options or drugs for both ALS and cancer.