Prognostic serum biomarkers for colorectal cancer – Review

Abstract

Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common malignancies in developed countries. Research for diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers is increasing. There are more than 750,000 papers indexed in PubMed directly related to biomarkers. A lot of these papers claim to report clinically useful biomarkers. Unfortunately, very few serum biomarkers are in clinical use. Materials and methods: We performed a review for most of the published CRC serum biomarkers in the PubMed, Embase and Web of Science databases. Results: In total, 119 articles were obtained from the databases, of which 89 articles reporting on CRC serum prognostic markers were considered as relevant. In these studies, a total of 200 individual tumor markers were obtained. Conclusions: A general approach to understand how to predict clinical outcomes using risk, diagnostic, and prognostic biomarkers, is needed. In the future, serum biomarkers will drive advances in risk, diagnosis, and prognosis, they will be the targets of powerful molecular therapies, and they will individualize and optimize therapy.