Treatment of cancer by risk stratification of patients based on comordidities

A method of treating cancer in a patient suffering from cancer by treating abnormalities in at least one gene encoding a comorbidity associated with a particular cancer, comprising

• a. selecting a cohort of patients suffering with the particular cancer;
• b. identifying a subset of patients having comorbidities;
• c. dividing the cohort into a training set of patients of approximately two-thirds of the cohort, and a validation set of patients of approximately one-third of the cohort;
• d. further stratify the training set stratify the training set by factors associated with cancer propensity;
• e. identifying genes encoding comorbidities in the training set;
• f. identifying mutations, alterations, or differential gene expression in the genes encoding comorbidities in each member of the training set and normalize the gene expression level against the reference set in patients without the cancer or comorbidity;
• g. correlating mutations in the genes encoding comorbidities in the training set with the severity of the cancer for each member of the training set by determining the gene expression level associated with each comorbidity and normalizing the gene expression level against the expression level of a reference set of RNA transcripts in patients without the cancer or comorbidity;
• h. applying the correlations from step (g) to the validation set and determining if the correlations are statistically significant to cancer severity in the validation set;
• i. if the results from step (h) are statistically significant, then apply the analysis to a further one or more patients not in the cohort;
• and
• j. treating the cancer by prescribing therapies that inhibit the expression of the one or more genes encoding comorbidities.