摘要：In current researches in clinical chemistry, an increasing number of projects are utilizing autoantibody signatures to test their diagnostic and prognostic values for cancer. For various types of cancer, it has been established or suggested that circulating immunoglobulins from the sera of cancer patients contain a repertoire of antibodies elicited against the tumor [1]. Interest of researchers toward this topic has been ignited partly by the findings that production of autoantibodies against tumor-associated antigens may precede clinical confirmation of tumors by several months or years [1]. Beyond their potential usefulness for cancer diagnosis, autoantibody signatures may show usefulness in occasions where a fine discriminatory power is required, such as inference of cancer stages. In the present issue of our journal, Partin et al report the performance of the panel of ten phage-peptides recognized by autoantibodies from prostate cancer patients in discriminating patients with prostate cancer of advanced stages (Gleason score 7 or greater) from those with Gleason score 6 [2].
