Cancer screening through a multi-analyte serum biomarker panel during health check-up examinations: Results from a 12-year experience

Background: The use of blood-based tumor biomarkers for screening malignancies at early stages has significant advantages, including being convenient, automated, quantitative, objective, and relatively inexpensive compared with histology, endoscopy, and imaging. Methods: We describe our 12-year experience on the diagnostic usefulness of a biomarker panel consisting of eight molecules (i.e., α-fetoprotein, carcinoembryonic antigen, prostate-specific antigen, CA 19-9, CA125, CA 15-3, squamous cell specific antigen, and cytokeratin 19 fragment) for cancer screening in Taiwanese subjects who underwent a health check-up examination at their own expenses. Results: The sensitivity of the panel for the detection of specific cancers was higher than that of isolated cancer-specific markers. Specifically, the sensitivity of the panel for identifying the four most commonly diagnosed malignancies (i.e., liver cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer) was 90.9%, 75.0%, 100%, and 76.9%, respectively. The ability of the panel to detect early-stage (stage 1) hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or prostate cancer was similar to that observed for advanced malignancies. Conclusions: The multi-analyte biomarker panel is clinically useful during health check-up examinations for the screening of different tumors (especially for the early detection of HCC and prostate malignancies).