We show that lung and pancreatic adenocarcinomas express the full spectrum of FR-α and FR-β combinations with ~76% of lung adenocarcinomas expressing both FR-α and FR-β while pancreatic cancers express primarily FR-β.
FOLR1 was highly expressed in metastatic lymph node samples from patients with advanced lung cancer and was mainly expressed in lung adenocarcinomas in primary lung cancer.
An ongoing phase II, double blind, placebo-controlled study is evaluating farletuzumab in patients with FOLR1 expressing metastatic adenocarcinoma of lung.
NSCLC overexpressed FRα and RFC1.In a multivariate analysis, lung adenocarcinomas were more likely to express FRα in the cytoplasm (OR = 4.39; p < 0.0001) and membrane (OR = 5.34; p < 0.0001) of malignant cells than squamous cell carcinomas.
These data demonstrate the diagnostic relevance of folate receptor alpha expression in non-small cell lung cancer as determined by immunohistochemistry and suggest that determination of folate receptor alpha expression provides prognostic information in patients with lung adenocarcinoma.