Charting Cancer’s Signature

Numerous teams around the world are engaged in the pursuit of cancer biomarkers – the pre-symptomatic indicators of cancer.  Stephen Albert Johnston, from Arizona State University (Arizona, USA), and colleagues have innovated a new technique, named immunosignaturing.  Rather than using a reductionist biomarker paradigm of existing cancer diagnostics, immunosignaturing relies on a multiplexed system in which the entire population of antibodies circulating in blood at a given time is profiled.  The technique employs a microarray consisting of thousands of random sequence peptides of 20 unit , randomly composed amino acid chains, imprinted on a glass slide. When a tiny droplet of blood, (less than a microliter), is spread across the microarray, antibodies in the blood selectively bind with individual peptides, forming a portrait of immune activity -- an immunosignature. To assess the diagnostic power of immunosignaturing, the researchers tested over 1,500 historical samples comprising 14 different diseases, including 12 cancers, resulting in an average accuracy of over 98%.  The study authors submit that: “These results demonstrate the potential power of the immunosignature approach in the accurate, simultaneous classification of disease.”