Pattern of serum autoantibodies allows accurate distinction between a tumor and pathologies of the same organ.

Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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.