The Prevalence of cancer-associated autoantibodies in patients with gastric cancer and progressive grades of premalignant lesions : research article

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Serum autoantibodies against tumor-associated antigens (TAA) are detectable in early stage gastric cancer patients; however, the time point during cancerogenesis when they appear in circulation is still obscure. METHODS: In this study, we developed a recombinant antigen microarray and analyzed the prevalence of autoantibodies against 102 TAAs in 829 gastric cancer patients and 929 healthy controls from Caucasian and Asian populations, as well as 100 patients with chronic atrophic gastritis and 775 individuals staged according to different grades of intestinal metaplasia. RESULTS: Six antigens, including CTAG1B/CTAG2, DDX53, IGF2BP2, TP53 and MAGEA3 were predominantly reacting with sera from gastric cancer patients when compared to healthy controls, and the seroreactivity was associated with intestinal type gastric cancer, but not with patients' H. pylori status, grade, age, gender or stage of gastric cancer. We detected gastric cancer-associated seroreactivity in 13% of patients with advanced/severe intestinal metaplasia, which was increased in comparison to mild/moderate intestinal metaplasia (5.3%), and was comparable to that seen in early stage gastric cancer patients (12%). Moreover, by testing serum samples taken 1-9 years before the clinical diagnosis of 18 incident gastric cancer cases, we detected autoantibody responses against several TAAs - SOX2, MYC, BIRC5, IGF2BP1 and MUC1. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that humoral immune response against TAAs is generated already during premalignant stages. IMPACT: Based on the obtained results, cancer-associated autoantibodies might make a valuable contribution to the stratification of high-risk patients with premalignant lesions in stomach through enhancing the positive predictive power of existing risk models.