Abstract
BackgroundEarly cancer diagnosis is one of the most important challenges of cancer research, since in many cancers it can lead to cure for patients with early stage diseases. For epithelial ovarian cancer (which is the leading cause of death among gynaecologic malignancies) the classical detection approach is based on measurements of CA-125 biomarker. However, the poor sensitivity and specificity of this biomarker impacts the detection of early-stage cancers.MethodsHere we use a computational approach to investigate the effect of combining multiple biomarkers for ovarian cancer (e.g., CA-125 and IL-7), to improve early cancer detection.ResultsWe show that this combined biomarkers approach could lead indeed to earlier cancer detection. However, the immune response (which influences the level of secreted IL-7 biomarker) plays an important role in improving and/or delaying cancer detection. Moreover, the detection level of IL-7 immune biomarker could be in a range that would not allow to distinguish between a healthy state and a cancerous state. In this case, the construction of solution diagrams in the space generated by the IL-7 and CA-125 biomarkers could allow us predict the long-term evolution of cancer biomarkers, thus allowing us to make predictions on cancer detection times.ConclusionsCombining cancer and immune biomarkers could improve cancer detection times, and any predictions that could be made (at least through the use of CA-125/IL-7 biomarkers) are patient specific.
Highlights
Cancer diagnosis is one of the most important challenges of cancer research, since in many cancers it can lead to cure for patients with early stage diseases
Note that in panel (a′) we show the size of the tumour at the detection times DT corresponding to the two cases shown in panels (b) and (c)
interleukin 7 (IL-7) is produced only by the immune cells and carbohydrate antigen 125 (CA-125) is produced only by tumour cells, the tumour detection time based on CA-125 (DTt = 8.8 years) is lower than the tumour detection time based on IL-7 (DTi = 9.27 years); see panels a′, b′
Summary
Cancer diagnosis is one of the most important challenges of cancer research, since in many cancers it can lead to cure for patients with early stage diseases. For epithelial ovarian cancer (which is the leading cause of death among gynaecologic malignancies) the classical detection approach is based on measurements of CA-125 biomarker. Ovarian cancer is the most fatal of all gynecologic malignancies, since it is usually detected in the later stages when the 5-year survival is only between 37–44% [1, 2]. Early cancer detection could increase patients 5-year survival rates to even 90% [3,4,5]. The classical approach for ovarian cancer diagnosis involves the serum tumour. To address this issue related to the CA-125 biomarker, the last 10–15 years have seen the development of various multimodal strategies that combine multiple diagnostic markers/tools [4, 9, 10]. We note the combination of CA-125 with transvaginal sonography [11], with human epididymal secretory protein 4 (HE4)
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