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Pattern of Serum Autoantibodies Allows Accurate Distinction between a Tumor and Pathologies of the Same Organ

Authors' Affiliations: Departments of ¹ Human Genetics, ² Neurology, and ³ Neurosurgery, Medical School, Saarland University, Homburg/Saar, Germany; ⁴ Center for Bioinformatics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany; and ⁵ Department of Internal Medicine I, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany

Requests for reprints: Eckart Meese, Department of Human Genetics, Medical School, Saarland University, Kirrberger Strasse, Homburg 66421, Germany. Phone: 49-6841-1626038; Fax: 49-6841-1626185; E-mail: hgemee{at}uniklinik-saarland.de.

Purpose: Recent studies impressively showed the diagnostic potential of seroreactivity patterns for different tumor types, offering the prospect for low-cost screening of numerous tumor types simultaneously. One of the major challenges toward this goal is to prove that seroreactivity profiles do not only allow for identifying a tumor but also allow for distinguishing tumors from other pathologies of the same organ.

Experimental Design: We chose glioma as a model system and tested 325 sera (88 glioma, 95 intracranial tumors, 60 other brain pathologies, and 82 healthy controls) for seroreactivity on a panel of 35 antigens.

Results: We were able to discriminate between glioma and all other sera with cross-validated specificity of 86.1%, sensitivity of 85.2%, and accuracy of 85.8%. We obtained comparably good results for the separation of glioma versus nontumor brain pathologies and glioma versus other intracranial tumors.

Conclusion: Our study provides first evidence that seroreactivity patterns allow for an accurate discrimination between a tumor and pathologies of the same organ even between different tumor types of the same organ.