Autoantibodies in Early Detection of Breast Cancer

Abstract

In spite of the progress made in treatment and early diagnosis, breast cancer remains a major public health issue worldwide. Although modern image-based screening modalities have significantly improved early diagnosis, around 15% to 20% of breast cancers still go undetected. In underdeveloped countries, lack of resources and cost concerns prevent implementing mammography for routine screening. Noninvasive, low-cost, blood-based markers for early breast cancer diagnosis would be an invaluable alternative that would complement mammography screening. Tumor-specific autoantibodies are excellent biosensors that could be exploited to monitor disease-specific changes years before disease onset. Although clinically informative autoantibody markers for early breast cancer screening have yet to emerge, progress has been made in the development of tools to discover and validate promising autoantibody signatures. This review focuses on the current progress toward the development of autoantibody-based early screening markers for breast cancer.See all articles in this CEBP Focus section, "NCI

Cyclic Peptide Mimotopes for the Detection of Serum Anti–ATIC Autoantibody Biomarker in Hepato-Cellular Carcinoma

“…The immune system responds to these non-self antigens, producing specific autoantibodies. Tumor-associated (TA) autoantibodies have been observed in patients with various tumors, including breast [ 4 ], prostate [ 5 , 6 ], lung [ 7 ], colorectal [ 8 ], ovarian [ 9 , 10 ], and liver [ 11 ], and have become of interest as cancer biomarkers because they can be easily detected in serum via minimally invasive blood collection [ 3 ].…”

A Panel of Tumor-associated Autoantibodies for the Detection of Early-stage Breast Cancer

“…Tumor-associated autoantibodies have become one of the most important areas in biomarker exploitation for early cancer detection, as autoantibody detection could precede the clinical symptoms of breast cancer 7 , 13 , 19 . Increasing studies have shown valuable role of autoantibodies in the diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of treatment effect of many types of cancers 20 , 21 .…”

“…For breast cancer, numerous serum autoantibodies have been reported with potential early diagnostic value, whereas only few have been investigated in detail to evaluate the diagnostic utility. To date, individual autoantibodies are shown to have low clinical sensitivity, thus cannot be applied to screen early breast cancer 7 . To resolve the issue of low sensitivity for early diagnosis, increasing studies have developed autoantibody panels 32 - 34 .…”

“…Recently, autoantibodies against tumorassociated antigens (TAAs) are found to have enormous potential for the exploitation of circulating protein-based biomarkers and have been proposed as hopeful biomarkers for early breast cancer detection [7,8]. TAAs, which have altered protein expression levels, protein misfolding, or aberrant post-translational modifications, can elicit immune responses resulting in the production of autoantibodies [9][10][11].…”

Identification of novel autoantibody signatures and evaluation of a panel of autoantibodies in breast cancer

“…Many studies have demonstrated that autoantibodies against tumor-associated antigens (TAA), so called TAAb, could be used for BC detection. 8,9 As potential tumor biomarkers, TAAb have several advantages:…”