A panel of autoantibodies as potential early diagnostic serum biomarkers in patients with cervical cancer

The study was designed to test whether circulating autoantibodies against associated antigens (TAAs) were altered in early cervical cancer and benign cervical tumors. A total of 111 cervical cancer patients, 137 cervical benign tumor patients, and 160 healthy volunteers matched in age were recruited in this study. The expression of autoantibodies was tested using in-house developed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with linear peptide envelope antigens derived from TAAs. One-way ANOVA test showed that there was no difference in the CD25 autoantibody expression among the cervical cancer group, benign tumor group, and healthy control group (P = 0.063; P = 0.191). The expression of autoantibodies against survivin and TP53 in the cervical cancer group was significantly higher than that in the benign tumor group (P < 0.001; P < 0.001). The levels of autoantibodies against cyclinB-1 and ANXA-1 were higher in the cervical cancer group than in the healthy control group (P = 0.010; P = 0.001), while autoantibodies in the cervical cancer group showed no difference in expression compared with that in the benign tumor group. The panel of five TAAs showed a sensitivity of 37.8 % and a specificity of 90 %, which was much higher than the sensitivity of the single-TAA testing group. The data from this study further support our previous hypothesis that the detection of autoantibodies for the diagnosis of a specific cancer type can be enhanced using a panel of several selected TAAs as target antigens.