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Identification of Cancer Autoantigens in Serum

Toward Diagnostic/Prognostic Testing?

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Abstract

The development of noninvasive screening tests would represent a major advance in the fight against cancer, as pre-clinical or early diagnosis could be considered the best weapons to reduce cancer mortality. The use of autoantibodies against cancer autoantigens is a promising alternative to fulfill this goal. Recent progress in protein microarray formats and other proteomic strategies has brought extraordinary opportunities to advance the discovery of new cancer autoantigens. These new approaches have allowed identification of autoantibodies with a higher prevalence, simplifying the development of predictor panels with wider coverage. Still, some issues have to be resolved before clinical application of these results. First, technical limitations in the quality and reproducibility of the microarrays and the statistical tools for data analysis have to be resolved. Second, thorough validation of the candidate biomarkers has to be carried out to include not just one particular cancer type but different cancers and other benign, inflammatory pathologies, which may give rise to cross-reactions and loss of the specificity and sensitivity of the predictive assay. The extraordinary sensitivity of the immune system to detect minor alterations in self-proteins might be used to highlight changes in the cancer protein sequence and structure that can be used for personalized therapy, including immunotherapeutic vaccines. The increasing detection of kinase proteins as autoantibody targets points to new molecules with potential therapeutic impact

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ingrid Babel for helpful discussions and her experimental work. Rodrigo Barderas is supported by a JAE-DOC contract with the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). This research was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (BIO2009-08818), the Colomics Programme of the Regional Government of Madrid, and a specific grant from the Fundación Mídica Mutua Madrileña. The authors have no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this article.

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  1. Functional Proteomics Laboratory, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CIB-CSIC), Ramiro de Maeztu 9, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    J. Ignacio Casal & Rodrigo Barderas

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  1. J. Ignacio Casal
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  2. Rodrigo Barderas
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Correspondence to J. Ignacio Casal.

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Ignacio Casal, J., Barderas, R. Identification of Cancer Autoantigens in Serum. Mol Diag Ther 14, 149–154 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03256367

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