Potential Biomarkers for Personalized Radiation Therapy for Patients with Uterine Cervical Cancer

Abstract

Uterine cervical cancer (UCC) is one of the most prevalent malignant neoplasms in the world. UCC develops beyond the stage in situ and is frequently treated by a combination of intracavitary radiation therapy and external beam radiation therapy; 30--40% of patients with similar prognosis factors do not respond equally to a comparable standard treatment. Therefore, the study and identification of prognostic biomarkers and predictive biomarkers, which allow the identification of subpopulations of patients most likely to respond to a given therapy, would be extremely useful in the selection of patients for the development of innovative and effective therapies for locally advanced, metastatic, and refractory uterine cervical cancer. A comparative analysis of UCC in the context of other cancers may reveal that it is relatively smaller number of targeted molecular agents that have been tested. Some studies indicate that there may be a significant association between the response to treatment and the tumor phenotype, characterized by changes in gene, protein, and metabolic expression. This expression of genes and proteins is modulated, some of them considered with possible prognostic value in UCC and in other types of cancer, such as those that we have studied in our work team, IGF1R, IGF-IGF-II, GAPDH, HIF-1 alpha, survivin, GLUT1, CAIX, HKII, hTERT, HPV16 variants. Of these, IGF1R, GAPDH, HIF-1 alpha, GLUT1, and factors such as HPV16 variants and hemoglobin levels will be the subject of this review as potential biomarkers for personalized oncological radiation in the management of UCC.