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Serum biomarkers may identify lung cancer in never smokers
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AACR 102nd Annual Meeting
ORLANDO, Fla. — A serum-based lung cancer test developed from six biomarkers performed equally well in a cohort of never smokers as it did in a cohort of smokers, according to results presented here at the American Association for Cancer Research 102nd Annual Meeting.
Charles E. Birse, PhD, principal scientist at the Celera Corp., in Rockville, Md., said approximately one-quarter of lung cancer cases are in never smokers.
“The proportion of lung cancer cases in never smokers is expected to increase as smoking prevention and cessation programs are implemented,” Birse said. “Moreover, lung cancer in smokers and never smokers show differences in demographics and in clinical and molecular profiles.”
He said CT scanning has higher sensitivity in detecting lung cancers, but biomarkers may serve as a valuable adjunctive tool.
“Whether it is done before or after the CT scan, evaluation of these biomarkers may be a rapid noninvasive method to confirm malignant status,” Birse said.
In a previous study, Birse and colleagues employed a mass spectrometry-based approach to identify serum biomarkers in smokers that may have led to the detection of non–small cell lung cancer of all stages.
“More than 500 candidate markers were identified,” Birse said. “We focused on key cellular compartments, which were differentially expressed.”
The current study uses the same approach in 600 samples from a cohort of never smokers from four sites.
Initial samples were randomly assigned to a training set of 128 NSCLC patients and 191 controls, and a testing set of 141 patients and 175 controls. A regression-based algorithm for lung cancer detection was created from these data.
For validation, an interview questionnaire was subsequently administered in a cohort of never smokers with lung cancer.
There were eight stage I cancer patients, four with stage II, 17 with stage III and 11 with stage IV. There were 21 adenocarcinomas, seven squamous cell cancers, eight bronchioalveolar and four cancers categorized as other. Forty controls were matched by age and gender.
Initially, nine biomarkers were assayed in serum collected from smoking participants with NSCLC and appropriate controls.
The researchers created a global six-marker test that demonstrated an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.87 in the cohort of smokers. The AUC was 0.91, with 85% sensitivity and 83% specificity, in the cohort of never smokers.
“Fitting of the model to data from the never-smoker cohort revealed that the algorithm again discriminated the malignant cases with strong performance,” the researchers wrote.
“These biomarkers may provide suitable performance across all lung cancer populations to design tests for a variety of diagnostic applications,” Birse said.
Disclosure: Dr. Birse is an employee of Celera Corp.
For more information:
- Birse CE. #2813. AACR 102nd Annual Meeting; April 2-6, 2011; Orlando, Fla.
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