Cancer Biomarkers : knowing the present and predicting the future

Cancer biomarkers are substances indicate that tumor state, progression characteristics, and response to therapies. Most cancer biomarkers are transcription factors, cell surface receptors, or secreted proteins that are produced by either cancer cells or other cells in response to cancer.

The cancer patients are usually diagnosed at the advanced stage where the treatment is not effective. Therefore, the biomarkers play an important role in early cancer diagnostic procedure, as the biomarkers have the ability to enhance the cancer detection and drug development procedure. In drug development procedure the biomarkers minimize the risk of clinical trial failure by enriching the trial populations with specific molecular subtypes responding better to tested therapies. Further, for treatment purpose genomes based biomarker available for cancer detection which also help to develop a personalized treatment for the cancer patients, which increases the drug response rate along with cost effectiveness and less side effects.

Over the past several decades, considerable investment has been made in the early detection of cancer. An increasing number of early cancers diagnosed as asymptomatic malignancies, or in some instances even as premalignant lesions, can be attributed to more efficient screening programs and changes in clinical practice. The definitive diagnosis of cancer, has however relied on histological evaluation of tissues. An ideal tumor marker would be a protein or protein fragment that can be easily detected in the patient’s blood or urine, but not detected in a healthy person. Today, the most common use of tumor biomarkers is for detection of early disease and recurrent disease. In the future, better tests that may predict tumor outcome in advance and predict the response of individual tumors to particular therapeutic drugs may be developed.