Plasma concentrations of VCAM‐1 and PAI‐1: A predictive biomarker for post‐operative recurrence in colorectal cancer

This prospective study used antibody suspension bead arrays to identify biomarkers capable of predicting post‐operative recurrence with distal metastasis in patients with colorectal cancer. One hundred colorectal cancer patients who underwent surgery were enrolled in this study. The median follow‐up period was 3.9 years. The pre‐operative plasma concentrations of 24 angiogenesis‐related molecules were analyzed with regard to the TNM stage and the development of post‐operative recurrence. The concentrations of half of the examined molecules (13/24) increased significantly according to the TNM stage (P < 0.05). Meanwhile, a multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that the concentrations of vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM‐1) and plasminogen activator inhibitor‐1 (PAI‐1) were significantly higher in the post‐operative recurrence group. The VCAM‐1 and PAI‐1 model discriminated post‐operative recurrence with an area under the curve of 0.82, a sensitivity of 0.75, and a specificity of 0.73. A leave‐one‐out cross‐validation was applied to the model to assess the prediction performance, and the result indicated that the cross‐validated error rate was 12.5% (12/96). In conclusion, our results demonstrate that antibody suspension bead arrays are a powerful tool to screen biomarkers in the clinical setting, and the plasma levels of VCAM‐1 and PAI‐1 together may be a promising biomarker for predicting post‐operative recurrence in patients with colorectal cancer. (Cancer Sci 2010)