MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ryo Nagashio, Ph.D.
Department of Molecular Diagnostics
School of Allied Health Sciences, Kitasato University
Japan.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women in the United States and worldwide. The disease is associated with a poor prognosis because most lung cancers are only diagnosed at an advanced stage. The identification of patients at an early stage of cancer when it can be treated surgically is extremely important to improve prognosis.
Current biomarkers for lung cancer include carcinoma embryonic antigen (CEA), sialyl Lewis X antigen (SLX), SCC antigen, and cytokeratin fragment (CYFRA) 21-1, but these are not sensitive enough to detect tumors early.
The results of our study provide evidence that the CKAP4 protein may be a novel early sero-diagnostic marker for lung cancer. Across disease stages I-IV, the sensitivities of serum CEA, CYFRA, and SCCa are reported with 30-52, 17-82, and 24-39 percent, respectively. In this study, the sensitivity of serum CKAP4 was 81 percent in the training set and 69 percent in the validation set. These rates are higher than those of the current sero-diagnostic markers. Furthermore, the sensitivity of serum CKAP4 was also high even in stage I non-small cell lung cancer.
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