Cancer biomarkers 2013: appunti a margine del convegno satellite EuroMedLab

AUTHORS

ABSTRACT

Cancer biomarkers 2013: notes about the EuroMedLab satellite meeting

Like all other interventions and devices in health care, cancer biomarkers should undergo a careful validation process before they are introduced into clinical practice for diagnostic or prognostic purposes. Particularly, for those candidate diagnostic markers, validation implies the assessment of their diagnostic accuracy according to pre-specified and standardized criteria. For prognostic purposes, large, protocol-driven prospective studies should assure unbiased results on the effectiveness of the investigated biomarkers in predicting patient’s risk of a future outcome, in aiding individual treatment choice and in patient counselling. The improvement of the methodology of research should finally contribute evidence of high level and strength useful to recommend or not the appropriate application of specific biomarkers in different clinical settings (screening, primary/secondary care, treatment monitoring, follow-up). In this presentation, we summarized the major issues highlighted during the recent EuroMedLab satellite meeting held in Venice (IT) on May 2013, in which standardized processes from the evaluation of biomarkers’ diagnostic accuracy and prognostic value for guideline development were discussed. In addition, current efforts on the research of novel molecules and therapeutic targets (proteins, exosomes, circulating nucleic acids) candidate to clinical introduction were briefly reviewed.

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