The promise of biomarkers in colorectal cancer detection.

Abstract

Reducing the burden from death and suffering due to cancer requires improving prevention and treatment efforts and incorporating early detection and risk assessment strategies into clinical practice. Early detection and screening of cancer predates a formal cancer prevention intervention studies. For example, social scientists have been involved in research determining the epidemiologic basis of and the cost-effectiveness of screening for symptomatic and asymptomatic disease. Notwithstanding the advent of newer high-throughput technologies the availability of well accepted screening tests has long been standing barriers to early cancer detection research. The early detection of cancer and risk assessment promises to increase the number of individuals whose cancer is diagnosed in a localized, curable stage, however, technological advances are constantly pushing the boundaries of early detection. Although not fully incorporated, recent advances in high through-putareas of gene-expression microarrays, tissue arrays, protein arrays, and proteomics offer new approaches and promise a brighter future for the early detection and cancer prevention. A coordinated research effort among biomarker-development laboratories, biomarker-validation laboratories, clinical repositories, and population-screening programs have a good promise for these technologies to be implicated in clinical practice for early detection of all cancers including colorectal. Here we discuss the need for early detection of colorectal cancers (CRC) in terms of its potential impact on morbidity and mortality and how current technology fails to detect early lesions and how molecular markers can enhance the this detection ability.