the second most common cancer in both men and women and the leading cause of cancer death in the US. Although there are risk factors for lung cancer, such as smoking, there are many cases where the patient never smoked. Because of this, there is growing interest in investigating the lung microbiota and how that may promote or prevent disease.
Yearly computer tomography (CT) screening is recommended for adults at risk as it can detect lung cancer early, however, it suffers from high false positive rates, leading to follow-up tests, surgeries and stress for patients. Indeterminate pulmonary nodules (IPN) due to microbial infections show up in CT screening, and even though only 4 percent are found to be cancerous, it is difficult to distinguish benign from malignant IPN. Thus, there is a need for molecular biomarkers which can detect lung cancer as well as distinguish between malignant and benign IPN detected by CT scan.
Researchers at Arizona State University have developed novel antimicrobial antibody panels that can determine if a subject has lung carcinoma and to help distinguish between malignant and benign indeterminate pulmonary nodules. These panels may help reduce the false positive rate of CT screening and provide interesting insight into lung cancer development. By using nucleic acid programmable protein array technology to screen antibodies in plasma samples from 127 lung adenocarcinoma (ADC) patients, 123 gender matched smoker controls (SMC) and 170 benign nodule controls (BNC) against about one thousand antigens from tens of different commensal and pathogenic bacteria and viruses, these antimicrobial antibody panels were developed.
Potential Applications
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Lung cancer diagnosis
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Distinguish between lung adenocarcinoma and smoker controls
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Distinguish between lung adenocarcinoma and benign nodule controls
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Provide insight into lung cancer development
Benefits and Advantages
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These panels have the potential to reduce the false positive rate of CT screening
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Provide novel and interesting insight into lung cancer development
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Cancer genetics, smoking history and nodule sizes affected antimicrobial antibody prevalence
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Largest survey on antimicrobial antibodies in lung cancer
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AUC of 0.88 and 0.80 for ADC vs. SMC and ADC vs BNC respectively
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Discovered that there were more antibodies with higher prevalence in light smokers compared with heavy smokers, in BNC with nodule size >1cm than in those with nodule size <1 cm, and in stage 1 ADC than in stage II or III ADC
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