Lung cancer is the leading cause of
cancer-related deaths for both men and women. Early diagnosis of
lung cancer has a 5-year survival rate of 48.8%, however, nearly 35% of stage I patients relapses after surgical resection, thus portending a poor prognosis. Therefore, detecting
lung cancer in early stage and further identifying the high-risk patients would allow the opportunity to provide adjuvant
therapy and possibly increase survival. There is considerable evidence that the immune system produces an
autoantibody response to neoplastic cells. The detection of such
autoantibodies has been shown to have diagnostic and prognostic value. Here we took advantage of the high-throughput Luminex technique to multiplex a total of 14
tumor-associated
autoantigens to detect the
autoantibody from the patients sera. The 14
antigens were expressed by in vitro transcription/translation system with
HaloTag at N-terminus. The fusion
proteins were then covalently immobilized onto the Luminex
microspheres conjugated by the halo-link
ligand, thus eliminating the
protein purification procedure. Sera samples from
cancer patients and healthy controls were interacted with the
microsphere-
antigen complex to measure the
autoantibodies. We have developed a quick multiplex detection system for measuring
autoantibody signature from patient sera with minimal cross-reaction. A panel of seven
autoantibody biomarkers has generated an AUC>80% in distinguishing the
lung cancers from healthy controls. This study is the first report by combining Luminex platform and
HaloTag technology to detect humoral immune response in
cancer patients. Due to the flexibility of the Luminex technology, this approach can be applied to others conditions such as infectious, neurological, and
metabolic diseases. One can envision that this multiplex Luminex system as well as the panel of seven
biomarkers could be used to screen the high-risk population with subsequent CT test based on the blood test result.