In a recent study published in the journal Cell Genomics , a team of researchers in China conducted a case-control study to analyze a large panel of serum proteins to identify protein biomarkers for incident pancreatic cancer. They used a Mendelian randomization approach to assess the potential causal effects of these proteins in pancreatic cancer. Study: Identification of biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets for pancreatic cancer by proteomic analysis in two prospective cohorts .
Image Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki / Shutterstock Pancreatic cancer has the third highest cancer-related mortality, with late diagnosis cases having a five-year survival rate of only 10%. However, detecting the cancer in its early stages can increase the survival rates by almost 24% to 37%. Given that pancreatic cancer is also a slowly progressing form of cancer, with an average span of 11.
7 years between the initial and invasive stages, there is sufficient time to detect the cancer in the early stages. Traditional cancer biomarkers, which include the carcinoembryonic antigen and carbohydrate antigens 19-9, 125, and 242, have shown varying specificity for pancreatic cancer. Inflammatory proteins such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF), C-reactive protein (CRP), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) have also not shown significant associations with incident pancreatic cancer.
Analysis of the blood proteome, which consists of all the circulating proteins secreted by normally functioning cells and tissues as wel.