Usefulness of cancer-testis antigens as biomarkers for the diagnosis and treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Usefulness of cancer-testis antigens as biomarkers for the diagnosis and treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma Fabio Grizzi1, Barbara Franceschini1, Cody Hamrick2,4, Eldo E Frezza2,3, Everardo Cobos2,4 and Maurizio Chiriva-Internati*2,4 Address: 1Laboratories of Quantitative Medicine, Istituto Clinico Humanitas IRCCS, Via Manzoni 56, 20089 Rozzano, Milan, Italy, 2Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Southwest Cancer Treatment and Research Center, 3601 4th St., 79430 Lubbock, Texas, USA, 3Department of Surgery, Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Southwest Cancer Treatment and Research Center, 3601 4th St., 79430 Lubbock, Texas, USA and 4Department of Hematology & Oncology, Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Southwest Cancer Treatment and Research Center, 3601 4th St., 79430 Lubbock, Texas, USA Email: Fabio Grizzi - [email protected]; Barbara Franceschini - [email protected]; Cody Hamrick - [email protected]; Eldo E Frezza - [email protected]; Everardo Cobos - [email protected]; Maurizio Chiriva-Internati* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 23 January 2007 Journal of Translational Medicine 2007, 5:3
doi:10.1186/1479-5876-5-3
Received: 26 November 2006 Accepted: 23 January 2007
This article is available from: http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/5/1/3 © 2007 Grizzi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Despite advances in our cellular and molecular knowledge, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains one of the major public health problems throughout the world. It is now known to be highly heterogeneous: it encompasses various pathological entities and a wide range of clinical behaviors, and is underpinned by a complex array of gene alterations that affect supra-molecular processes. Four families of HCC tumour markers have been recently proposed: a) onco-fetal and glycoprotein antigens; b) enzymes and iso-enzymes; c) cytokines and d) genes. A category of tumour-associated antigens called cancer-testis (CT) antigens has been identified and their encoding genes have been extensively investigated. CT antigens are expressed in a limited number of normal tissues as well as in malignant tumors of unrelated histological origin, including the liver. Given that cancers are being recognized as increasingly complex, we here review the role of CT antigens as liver tumour biomarkers and their validation process, and discuss why they may improve the effectiveness of screening HCC patients and help in determining the risk of developing HCC.
Background Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignancy affecting approximately one million of people around the wo
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