Study of circulating IgG antibodies to peptide antigens derived from BIRC5 and MYC in cervical cancer

The present study was undertaken to detect circulating IgG antibodies to peptide antigens derived from baculoviral IAP repeat-containing protein 5 isoform 2 (BIRC5) and myc proto-oncogene protein (MYC) in cervical cancer. A total of 107 female patients with cervical cancer of stages I and II, and 130 healthy female subjects were recruited for analysis of circulating IgG antibodies to BIRC5 and MYC. Student’s t-test showed significant differences in circulating levels of anti-BIRC5 IgG (t = −4.27, df = 235, P < 0.0001) and anti-MYC IgG (t = 3.51, df = 232, P = 0.0005) between the patient group and the control group. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.67 with sensitivity of 23.4% against specificity of 90% for the anti-BIRC5 IgG assay and an AUC of 0.66 with sensitivity of 9.4% against specificity of 90.6% for the anti-MYC IgG assay. Analysis of quality control samples gave an inter-assay deviation of 8.9% in the anti-BIRC5 IgG assay and 9.0% in the anti-MYC IgG assay. This work suggests that anti-BIRC5 IgG could serve as a biomarker for early diagnosis of cervical cancer although a panel of such tumor-associated antigens is needed to develop a highly sensitive test.