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Colorectal Cancer Circulating Biomarkers

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Biomarkers in Cancer

Abstract

Circulating CRC markers might become useful tools for the massive screening of people since they satisfy a high degree of accuracy, noninvasiveness, reproducibility, and economy. Within circulating biomarkers, we will focus on the detection of autoantibodies in serum from cancer patients and their target tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). Although the sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value of individual TAAs present low scores, the combination of multiple TAAs shows improved values to discriminate between CRC patients and controls. In this review, we outline the methodologies used to identify circulating autoantibodies and their target proteins and discuss the relevance of CRC autoantibodies for diagnosis at, particularly, early stages. An overview of the reported biomarkers is given, showing the large complexity of the autoantibody response in cancer. Different strategies to improve CRC diagnostic tests by combining autoantibodies from different studies will be discussed. Association of autoantibodies to prognosis, recurrence, and the survival of patients will be introduced. We conclude that there is a great potential for the use of autoantibodies as diagnostic CRC biomarkers in the near future.

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Abbreviations

CEA:

Carcinoembryonic antigen

CRC:

Colorectal cancer

EMT:

Epithelial to mesenchymal transition

HPLC:

High-performance liquid chromatography

MSI:

Microsatellite instability

NAPPA:

Nucleic acid programmable protein arrays

PTMs:

Posttranslational modifications

SEREX:

Serological analysis of recombinant cDNA expression libraries

SERPA:

Serological proteome analysis

TAA:

Tumor-associated antigen

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Correspondence to J. Ignacio Casal .

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Barderas, R., Villar-Vázquez, R., Casal, J.I. (2015). Colorectal Cancer Circulating Biomarkers. In: Preedy, V., Patel, V. (eds) Biomarkers in Cancer. Biomarkers in Disease: Methods, Discoveries and Applications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7681-4_29

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