Affiliations: [a] Cancer Research Institute, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea | [b] Department of Life Science, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea | [c] Department of Nursing, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Korea | [d] Department of Surgery, | [e] Department of Surgery, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and the Nashville VA Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Hyuk-Joon Lee, Cancer Research Institute, Department of Surgery, Seoul National University College of Medicine, 28 Yeongeon-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-744, Korea. Tel.: +82 2 2072 1957; Fax: +82 2 766 3875; E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Few reliable blood markers are available for detecting gastric cancer, mainly owing to the heterogeneity of the cancer. OBJECTIVE: To establish gastric cancer diagnostic markers, we evaluated the levels of plasma cadherin 17 (CDH17) and trefoil factor 3 (TFF3), which are secretory proteins and known markers for intestinal metaplasia (IM), in patients with gastric cancer. METHOD: The protein expression level was analyzed in blood plasma samples from 111 gastric cancer patients and 44 healthy individuals, using a sandwich ELISA kit, followed by statistical analyses. RESULT: Overall, the plasma levels of CDH17 and TFF3 were not significantly different between groups (p= 0.160 and p= 0.113, respectively). However, CDH17 expression was significantly elevated in patients with stage II and III gastric cancers compared to that in healthy controls (p= 0.023 and p= 0.037, respectively). In contrast, TFF3 levels were significantly elevated in patients with stage I (p= 0.001) and T1 gastric cancer (p= 0.013). The sensitivity and specificity of CDH17 were 66.7 and 61.4%, respectively (cutoff point: 0.189 ng/mL); for TFF3, these values were 62.2 and 56.8%, respectively (cutoff point: 5.215 ng/mL). CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate that secretory protein markers for metaplastic lineages can be used as blood markers for gastric cancer.
Keywords: CDH17, TFF3, ELISA, gastric cancer marker
