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Updated: Jun 12, 2026
Isolation of Proximal Fluids to Investigate the Tumor Microenvironment of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma
Published on: November 5, 2020
Detection of pancreatic adenocarcinoma using circulating fragments of fibrinogen
Douglas G Ward1, Wenbin Wei, John Buckels
1School of Cancer Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Background:
There is an urgent need for biomarkers to detect pancreatic cancer in the early, potentially curable, stages.
Methods:
We have used SELDI profiling to analyze serum from 75 patients with pancreatic cancer and 61 patients with nonmalignant pancreaticobiliary diseases.
Results:
A peak in the SELDI spectra corresponding to a 53 residue fragment of the α-chain of fibrinogen is remarkably elevated in approximately 50% of the cancer patients. In addition, fibrinogen degradation products were measured using the DR-70 assay. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves for the SELDI-detected fibrinogen fragment, DR-70 and CA19-9 were 0.65, 0.75 and 0.86, respectively. Class prediction models using combinations of these markers did not increase the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve compared with CA19-9. The novel fibrinogen fragment was not elevated to the same extent in other malignancies but was elevated in some patients with benign pancreatic disease.
Conclusion:
Both the SELDI-detected fragment of fibrinogen and DR-70 are significantly elevated in the serum of pancreatic cancer patients. However, they do not seem to improve pancreatic cancer detection over CA19-9 alone.
