Advances in individual markers of interferon in anti-cancer therapy

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Abstract

Interferon (IFN) is a cytokine with various biological functions, including antivirus, immunoregulation and antitumor. It has been wildly used in many anti-cancer therapies, including malignant melanoma, hepatocellular carcinoma, advanced renal-cell carcinoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, chronic myelogenous leukemia and AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma. However, its effective dose is always very high, which may bring some serious side effects, nevertheless, not all patients can benefit from the IFN therapy. So a problem we have faced is that how to improve the efficiency and sensitivity of IFN? To solve this problem, many studies have been launched to find the effective prognostic factors and individual biomarkers for guiding the treatment better. In addition, further clarifying the anti-tumor mechanisms of IFN is benefit for explaining how the biomarkers predict prognosis of patients. In recent studies, many IFN associated genes and proteins predicting sensitivity of IFN therapy have been found, which may associate with the progression of cancer, such as IFN regulatory factor (IRF), IFNAR2 mRNA, microRNA, IFITM-1. Some factors in peripheral blood are easier to detect and have the potential to been popularized in clinical practice, such as CD8high CD57+ lymphocyte levels in malignant melanoma, serum IFNAR2 mRNA in mCRC. This review briefly summarized the advances of antitumorally individual markers of IFN.

Key words

interferon (IFN) individual biomarker anti-tumor predict 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Medical OncologyThe Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of MedicineHangzhouChina
  2. 2.Department of GastroenterologyThe Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of MedicineHangzhouChina

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