Serologic laboratory findings in malignancy

Autoantibodies are extremely promising diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of cancer, and have the potential to promote early diagnosis and to make a large impact by improving patient outcome and decreasing mortality. Moreover, autoantibodies may be useful reagents in the identification of subjects at risk for cancer, bearing premalignant tissue changes. Great efforts are being made in many laboratories to validate diagnostic panels of autoantibodies with high sensitivity and specificity that could be useful in a clinical setting. It is likely that prospective studies of sufficiently large cohorts of patients and controls using high-throughput technology may allow the identification of biomarkers with diagnostic significance, and perhaps of discrete antigen phenotypes with clinical significance. The identification of TAAs may also be essential for the development of anticancer vaccines, because autoantibodies found in cancer sera target molecules involved in signal transduction, cell-cycle regulation, cell proliferation, and apoptosis, playing important roles in carcinogenesis. On this basis, molecular studies of antigenantibody systems in cancer promise to yield valuable information on the carcinogenic process. TAAs identified by serum antibodies in cancer sera can be natural immunogenic molecules, useful as targets for cancer immunotherapy. An important problem encountered in the practice of medicine is the identification of healthy individuals in the general population who unknowingly are at high risk of developing cancer. For the rheumatologist, a related problem is the identification of those patients with rheumatic diseases who are at high risk for developing a malignant process. These problems encountered in the fields of cancer and the rheumatic diseases can in the future be helped by new diagnostic instruments based on antibodies. The need for promoting the early diagnosis of cancer is a recognized major public health problem in need of significant research support for the validation of multiple promising but inconclusive studies, with the intention of producing diagnostic panels of autoantibodies in various types of cancers. Cancer developing in patients with rheumatic diseases is also an important problem requiring prospective longterm follow-up studies of patients with rheumatic diseases, particularly because some of the new biologic therapies seem to increase the cancer risk. It is possible that a panel of autoantibodies common to patients with cancer and the rheumatic diseases may prove to be of value in the identification of those patients with ADs at high risk for neoplasms.