The quest for ovarian cancer's Holy Grail: can CA-125 still be the chalice of early detection? Clinical Oncology

摘要

Since its discovery more than 25 years ago, the CA-125 tumor antigen has become the standard for monitoring ovarian cancer patients' response to therapy and for surveillance for recurrent disease. Its usefulness for screening, early detection, and risk prediction, however, has been limited by both false-positive and false-negative results. Thus, the quest for an effective ovarian cancer screening test has become a goal intensely sought after by investigators, both in the clinic and in the laboratory. Two approaches to improve early detection include evaluating ever more sophisticated uses of CA-125 alone, or looking toward the discovery of novel ovarian cancer biomarkers to augment or replace CA-125. We believe that, despite the work by Hermsen et al published in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the latter approach, involving new biomarker discovery and multiplexing combinations of markers, holds greater promise of successfully achieving this goal.