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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1538071
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancements in Immune Heterogeneity in Inflammatory Diseases and Cancer: New Targets, Mechanisms, and Strategies View all 7 articles

Exploration of the Diagnostic and Prognostic Roles of Decreased Autoantibodies in Lung Cancer

Provisionally accepted
Ying Ye Ying Ye 1,2YI HUANG YI HUANG 3Jianbo Pan Jianbo Pan 1,4*
  • 1 Basic Medicine Research and Innovation Center for Novel Target and Therapeutic Intervention, Ministry of Education, College of Pharmacy, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China
  • 2 Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China
  • 3 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Fujian Provincial Hospital, Fuzhou, Fuzhou, China
  • 4 Department of Precision Medicine Center, Second Affiliated Hospital, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Tumor-associated antigens (TAA) are proteins expressed during the growth and development of tumor cells, and TAA autoantibodies (TAAbs) can be detected in the serum of lung cancer patients, which can be utilized in the early screening of lung cancer. Almost all the TAAbs applied for diagnosis are those elevated, however, there are still large numbers of autoantibodies detected to decrease in tumor serums, and their functions were rarely known. Diagnosing malignant small lung nodules (≤3cm) in CT scans remains a challenge in clinical practice, and in this study, we combined those decreased autoantibodies to explore their diagnostic values in early lung cancers. In total, 15 types of decreased autoantibodies were identified, and 6 of them were constructed into a predictive model for early lung cancer, reaching a sensitivity of 76.19% and a specificity of 55.74%. We combined with 4 elevated TAAbs, the sensitivity and the specificity of the 10-marker model can attain 80.0% and 87.0%, respectively, which is higher than that of the commonly used 7-TAAbs model in diagnosis for early-stage lung cancer. Moreover, 5 of the decreased autoantibodies can also be applied for supervising bone metastasis in lung adenocarcinoma. A follow-up process for 13 patients diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer revealed that 10 of the 15 decreased autoantibodies would recover to a higher level after the tumor was resected. Bioinformatic analysis indicated that the 15 biomarkers were strongly correlated with the prognosis of lung cancer patients, thus urgent for more in-depth exploration.

    Keywords: TAA autoantibodies, Decreased autoantibodies, Early-stage lung cancer, Diagnostic models, Novel tumor markers

    Received: 02 Dec 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Ye, HUANG and Pan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jianbo Pan, Basic Medicine Research and Innovation Center for Novel Target and Therapeutic Intervention, Ministry of Education, College of Pharmacy, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.