Abstract
The low prevalence of pancreatic cancer remains an obstacle to the development of effective screening tools in an asymptomatic population. However, development of effective serologic markers still offers the potential for improvement of diagnostic capabilities, especially for subpopulations of patients with high risk for pancreatic cancer. The accurate identification of patients with pancreatic cancer and the exclusion of disease in those with benign disorders remain important goals. While clinical experience largely dismissed many candidate markers as useful markers of pancreatic cancer, CA19-9 continues to show promise. The present review highlights the development and the properties of different tumor markers in pancreatic cancer and their impact on the diagnostic and treatment of this aggressive disease.
Highlights
Pancreatic cancer (PDAC) is an exceptionally devastating and in most cases incurable disease with surgery as the only treatment with curative intent
Du-PAN 2 is a monoclonal antibody raised against the human pancreatic adenocarcinoma cell line
SPan-1 monoclonal antibody was produced by immunization with the mucin-producing human pancreatic cancer cell line SW1990 and reacts with a sialylated epitope carried by a mucin [37]
Summary
Pancreatic cancer (PDAC) is an exceptionally devastating and in most cases incurable disease with surgery as the only treatment with curative intent. In very few exceptions the use of tumor markers for screening is reasonable, e.g., PSA for prostate cancer. The reason for this is based on the relative low incidence of neoplasms in a normal population. This can be exemplified for pancreatic cancer: PDAC has a prevalence of 6/100,000 in the normal population [1] If such a population of 100,000 were screened by a tumor marker with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 99%, there would be 1010 positive tests of which only six would be true positives and the remaining 1004 would be false positives. We try to weight the acceptability of each marker for clinical and experimental application by review of literature
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