Evaluation of Serum-Autoantibody-Biomarkers for early diagnostic testing of Colon and Prostate Cancers
Lead partner:
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Scientific management:
Andreas Weinhäusel
Additional participating institutions:
Landesklinikum Wiener Neustadt
Landesklinikum Wiener Neustadt
Research field:
Onkologie
Funding tool: Basic research projects
Project-ID: LS09-030
Project start: 01. August 2010
Project end: will follow
Runtime: 36 months / finished
Funding amount: € 265.000,00
Brief summary:
Aim of this project is to identify tumor autoantibodies and to develop a test which enables early identification of colon and prostate cancer patients. This will be achieved by close cooperation of clinicians from the Landesklinikum Wiener Neustadt and the research group “Molecular Medicine” of the Austrian Institute of Technology, Seibersdorf. In cancer-patients autoantibodies against the cancerous tissue are generated as well as serum-antibody profiles change. Those profile-changes are highly potential markers for early diagnosis of cancer. However until today technical prerequisites performing an efficient marker screen were lacking.
Within recent work we have developed and optimized protein-microarray technology for defining tumor-markers. Using our improved technology we will produce a protein-chip from 16000 human cDNA expression clones. On these 16k protein chip we will perform a candidate marker screen for identifying autoantibody profiles suitable for unequivocal distinction of normal, malign and benign colon and prostate tumors. Biomarker screening will be performed with serum samples from a test set of 50 individuals per group and tumor entity (n=300). Then the reactive cDNA-clones of candidate biomarkers will be used for protein-array production of targeted protein arrays for validation of biomarkers. Validation will be done using a validation-set of serum samples from 100 individuals per group and tumor entity (n=600). Finally this project will generate a prototype-test suitable for randomized prospective validation of autoantibody based diagnostic testing using several hundred samples. This strategy will facilitate testing using a few micro liters of patient’s serum and enables early identification of cancer.
Keywords:
colon cancer, prostate cancer, minimal invasive diagnsotics, polyposis, adenoma, prostate hyperplasia, tumour, screening, autoantibodies, diagnostic test, microarray, proteomics, bioinformatics