Biomarkers /
ALK
Overview
ALK (anaplastic lymphoma receptor tyrosine kinase) encodes for the ALK tyrosine kinase receptor protein. ALK missense mutations, fusions, copy number gains, and/or protein expression aberrations are observed in neuroblastoma, anaplastic large cell lymphoma, colorectal cancer, inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor, non-small cell lung cancer, ovarian cancer, renal cell carcinoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, and other cancer types (PMID: 24715763; PMID: 22570254; PMID: 21076462; PMID: 22743654). Activation of ALK contributes to cell growth, proliferation, survival, and migration (PMID: 22585002).
ALK is altered in 3.33% of all cancers with lung adenocarcinoma, colon adenocarcinoma, breast invasive ductal carcinoma, cutaneous melanoma, and endometrial endometrioid adenocarcinoma having the greatest prevalence of alterations [3].
The most common alterations in ALK are ALK Mutation (2.81%), ALK Missense (2.63%), ALK Fusion (0.53%), ALK-EML4 Fusion (0.21%), and ALK Amplification (0.10%) [3].
Biomarker-Directed Therapies
Clinical Trials
Significance of ALK in Diseases
B-Cell Lymphoma, Unclassifiable, With Features Intermediate Between Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma And Classical Hodgkin Lymphoma +
References
1. Hart R and Prlic A. Universal Transcript Archive Repository. Version uta_20180821. San Francisco CA: Github;2015. https://github.com/biocommons/uta
2. The UniProt Consortium. UniProt: a worldwide hub of protein knowledge. Nucleic Acids Research. 2019;47:D506-D515.
3. The AACR Project GENIE Consortium. AACR Project GENIE: powering precision medicine through an international consortium. Cancer Discovery. 2017;7(8):818-831. Dataset Version 8. This dataset does not represent the totality of the genetic landscape; see paper for more information.
4. All assertions and clinical trial landscape data are curated from primary sources. You can read more about the curation process here.