Discovering novel lung cancer associated antigens and the utilization of their autoantibodies in detection of lung cancer

Objective The identification of tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) and their corresponding autoantibodies in lung cancer (LC) may expand our vision of cancer immunity. This study aims to screen novel TAAs to distinguish LC from the healthy population. Methods In our previous study, 35 genes encoding LC-associated TAAs were identified from the serological analysis of recombinant cDNA expression libraries (SEREX), and Oncomine database was further used to identify potential genes in cancer progression. Autoantibody to TAAs were tested by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in sera from 1379 participants in validation set and verification set. Findings Based on analysis of three independent microarrays in Oncomine, ten genes were consistently dysregulated in LC. The sera level and positive frequency of the anti-TOP2A, anti-ACTR3, anti-RPS6KA5 and anti-PSIP1 from LC patients were higher than normal control in validation set. The area under curve (AUC) of anti-TOP2A, anti-ACTR3, anti-RPS6KA5 and anti-PSIP1 was respectively 0.758, 0.787, 0.707, 0.668. The sensitivity of these four autoantibodies for LC detection ranged from 26.63 % to 32.07 % with the specificity over 90 %. Data from the verification set confirmed the results. Except that, the frequency of serum autoantibody against TOP2A (43.3 %) and ACTR3 (50.0 %) was significantly higher in early stage LC than late stage (23.6 % and 22.3 %, respectively). Conclusion TOP2A, ACTR3, RPS6KA5 and PSIP1 can elicit humoral immune response in LC and their autoantibodies have relationship with the tumorigenesis of LC. Anti-TOP2A and anti-ACTR3 have the potential to serve as a serological biomarkers in early stage LC.