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Systemic inflammation as a confounding factor in cancer biomarker discovery and validation

Nature Reviews Cancer volume 10, pages 2–3 (2010)Cite this article

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Cancer and inflammation are inextricably linked and cancer patients have local and systemic changes in inflammatory parameters. However, this crucial aspect of tumour biology is often overlooked in biomarker studies and needs to be urgently addressed.

Despite the evidence that inflammation is an inherent component of cancer, this seems to be ignored in most biomarker studies. We argue that most cancer biomarker studies using modern technologies are methodologically flawed as they compare samples from cancer patients with those of healthy, inflammation-free people, or at best with those of patients with benign tumours. Such validation studies overlook the fact that the systemic inflammatory response in cancer patients frequently relates to clinical parameters and as such have prognostic value, but this is not equivalent to cancer specificity.

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Figure 1: A network of local and systemic inflammation in cancer patients.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Immunology, Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Centre and Institute of Oncology, Roentgena 5, Warsaw, 02-781, Poland

    Magdalena Chechlinska

  2. Department of Molecular Biology, Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Centre and Institute of Oncology, Roentgena 5, Warsaw, 02-781, Poland

    Magdalena Kowalewska & Radoslawa Nowak

Authors
  1. Magdalena Chechlinska
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  2. Magdalena Kowalewska
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  3. Radoslawa Nowak
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Correspondence to Magdalena Chechlinska.

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Chechlinska, M., Kowalewska, M. & Nowak, R. Systemic inflammation as a confounding factor in cancer biomarker discovery and validation. Nat Rev Cancer 10, 2–3 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc2782

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