Discovery and validation of a serologic autoantibody panel for early diagnosis of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Background: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) accounts for the highest incidence rate worldwide and is responsible for the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death. Currently, serologic biomarkers for early ESCC diagnosis are needed for timely treatment. Methods: The performance of a four-autoantibody panel (i.e., anti-TP53, HRAS, CTAG1A, and NSG1) was evaluated by ELISA for the early diagnosis of ESCC with 569 retrospective serum samples. A training set comprising 129 patients with early-stage ESCC, 130 patients with esophageal benign lesion (EBL), and 150 healthy controls (HC) was used to develop an early ESCC predictive model. Data obtained from an independent validation set were used to evaluate and validate the predictive model to distinguish the early ESCC from the controls (EBLþHC). Finally, a multiplexed assay based on the Luminex xMAP technology platform was developed to enable simultaneous detection of the four-autoantibody panel using the validation set. Results: The four-autoantibody panel significantly discriminated early ESCC cases from the controls with 62.8% sensitivity at 88.9% specificity in the training set and with 58.0% sensitivity at 90.0% specificity in the independent validation set. The results of the multiplexed assay using xMAP technology for early ESCC showed a significant correlation with that of the ELISA assays with 66.0% sensitivity at 90.9% specificity. Conclusions: A four-autoantibody panel showed good performance for early ESCC diagnosis with ELISA and could be further developed into a multiplex assay using the Luminex xMAP technology. Impact: The four-autoantibody panel could be used for serologic screening for early ESCC.