Abstract
Purpose: Recent studies impressively showed the diagnostic potential of seroreactivity patterns
for different tumor types, offering the prospect for low-cost screening of numerous tumor types
simultaneously. One of the major challenges toward this goal is to prove that seroreactivity
profiles do not only allow for identifying a tumor but also allow for distinguishing tumors from
other pathologies of the same organ.
Experimental Design: We chose glioma as a model system and tested 325 sera (88 glioma,
95 intracranial tumors, 60 other brain pathologies, and 82 healthy controls) for seroreactivity on
a panel of 35 antigens.
Results: We were able to discriminate between glioma and all other sera with cross-validated
specificity of 86.1%, sensitivity of 85.2%, and accuracy of 85.8%.We obtained comparably good
results for the separation of glioma versus nontumor brain pathologies and glioma versus other
intracranial tumors.
Conclusion: Our study provides first evidence that seroreactivity patterns allow for an accurate
discrimination between a tumor and pathologies of the same organ even between different tumor
types of the same organ.
