Biomarkers of potential therapeutic value

Abstract

Prostate cancer is shown to have a biologically heterogeneous nature, and the prognosis of patients after a diagnosis of this disease is extremely variable. Accordingly, despite the widespread use of the prostate-specific antigen test, it would be absolutely necessary to identify molecular biomarkers for exactly predicting the clinical course of this disease in an individual patient. Based on recent advance in characterizing molecular mechanism mediating progression of prostate cancer, intensive studies have been performed for identifying novel biomarkers for prostate cancer using newly developed attractive approaches, including microarray techniques and proteomic/metabolic profiling analyses. To date, there have been a number of candidate biological markers discovered that would be likely to be associated with cell-cycle regulation, apoptosis, signal transduction, cell adhesion, angiogenesis, and other pathophysiological functions. Then, the relevance of these candidate markers have been validated in clinical setting, and some of them showed promising outcomes. Furthermore, the integration of selected biomarkers with conventional clinicopathological variables has been reported to produce predictive models showing outcomes superior to standard predictive system, like a nomogram. Collectively, these findings suggest that despite several limitations to be overcome prior to the introduction of these biomarkers into clinical practice of prostate cancer, once strictly evaluated, such biomarkers may help provide variable information on clinical decision-making during treatment of patients with prostate cancer.