1 Dys-regulated Gene Expression Networks by Meta-Analysis of Microarray Data on Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the sixth most common type of carcinoma worldwide. Development of OSCC is a multi-step process involving genes related to cell cycle, growth control, apoptosis, DNA damage response and other cellular regulators. The pathogenic pathways involved in this tumor are mostly unknown and therefore a better characterization of OSCC gene expression profile would represent a considerable advance. The availability of publicly available gene expression datasets has opened up new challenges especially for the integration of data gener-ated by different research groups and different array platforms with the purpose of obtaining new in-sights on the biological process investigated. Results: In this work we performed a meta-analysis on four microarray and four datasets of gene ex-pression data on OSCC in order to evaluate the degree of agreement of the biological results obtained by these different studies and to identify common regulatory pathways that could be responsible of tumor growth. Sixteen dys-regulated pathways implicated in OSCC were mined out from the four pub-lished datasets, and most importantly three pathways were first reported. Those regulatory pathways and biological processes which are significantly enriched have been investigated by means of litera