Talk:Cancer biomarker

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 6 January 2020 and 25 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Julianaquintero0917.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Planned restructure - April 2013
Will be making significant changes to this article in the hours ahead (as part of a college course a graduate course in cancer biology). Plan is to restructure the article using the following:

Defining Cancer Biomarkers

Role of Biomarkers in Cancer Research and Medicine
 * Uses of Biomarkers in Cancer Medicine
 * Risk Assessment
 * Diagnosis
 * Prognosis
 * Prediction of Treatment Response
 * Pharmacokinetics
 * Monitoring Treatment Responses
 * Recurrence


 * Uses of Biomarkers in Cancer Drug Discovery
 * Developing Drug Targets
 * Surrogate Endpoints

Biomarkers by Cancer Type
 * Breast Cancer
 * Prostate Cancer
 * Ovarian Cancer
 * Stomach Cancer
 * Lung Cancer
 * Colon Cancer
 * Melanoma
 * Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

Methods for Cancer Biomarker Discovery
 * Genomics
 * Proteomics
 * Metabolomics
 * Molecular Imaging
 * In Silico

Challenges for Biomarker Adoption in Cancer Care — Preceding unsigned comment added by Afhaque (talk • contribs)


 * Great! Before you dig in too deep please look at WP:MEDRS to see our standards for sourcing biomedical information.  It looks like you are already using secondary sources (Review articles and the like) from MEDLINE-indexed journals so definitely keep that up.  We generally altogether avoid primary sources (individual studies) in our medical articles.  Also see WP:MEDMOS for our guidelines on how medical articles are structured.  But also just feel free to add content and worry about formatting later.  The two most important rules are:  Use great sourcing (see WP:MEDRS) and do not plagiarize (can't copy and paste from abstracts or textbooks, etc.).  Happy editing!   03:59, 26 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the input (and warning) Zad! I wasn't too sure if Wiki liked having reviews or original articles. I guess I sort of lucked out that I've mainly been using reviews throughout. Afhaque (talk) 11:13, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Suggested merge with tumor marker
- Not sure about this - what would we call it? cancer and tumor biomarkers? Some tumors are benign, and some cancers like leukemia are not tumors. - Rod57 (talk) 18:02, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

- As the articles are written now, there is considerable overlap between this page (Cancer Biomarkers) and Tumor Markers. Both have, however, a vital function in Wikipedia. therefore, in my view this article (Cancer Biomarkers) should be re-written and possibly re-named to clarify the limits.

As I see it, the term Tumor Markers is used for functional proteins and conjugated proteins (antibodies, enzymes), antigens or antigen fragments (particularly surface antigens), hormones, cell debris (for instance degraded cytokeratins) that have either ended up in the circulation in the course of a cancer process or can be demonstrated in unnatural quantities in tissue by histology. They are used either by clinical-chemical methods in body fluids or histologically in tissues. Sometimes they have been considered also for treatment, for instance with "magic bullets" or as targets for immunization. Tumor markers does not include genetic markers.

Cancer biomarkers, on the other hand, is typically used for genetic markers. They may be genes that pre-dispose for malignancy or markers that result from malignant changes of the genetic or paragenetic set-up of given cells and form the origin of malignant growth, by themselves of together with other unfortunate changes in the cells. My suggestion is therefore that this article Cancer Biomarkers includes a limiting definition of the scope (this or some other suitable) and is re-written in accordance with a link to the article Tumor Markers and the article Tumor Markers is re-written with a corresponding definition of its scope, a link to this article and is re-written to include information found in this article that falls within the scope of Tumor Markers, and also to be up-dated and completed (needs complete revision).

I will be happy to do part of the job, but first let us agree who is doing what, not to duplicate the jobs.

Lave (talk) 12:28, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Please update with info on new biomarkers
I think it may be good to add info about these three and maybe similar developments to relevant articles (possibly the ones wikilinked):

Progress in cancer pre-screening, screening and early detection is reported: metabolomic biomarkers in blood (4 J.), circulating proteins biomarkers (7 J.),  and an optical biopsy system with a fine-needle probe (6 J.).

It's currently featured like above in 2022 in science (January).

I'm not sure if, where and how it would be most due. For instance, these three studies/results/developments may be too specific to add as is to their respective most relevant articles and would need some broader info (as in what Natureium said above).

This may also be relevant for a timeline, but as is it doesn't seem fit for Timeline of cancer treatment development, and Timeline of biomarkers (or something similar) doesn't (yet?) exist.

I also asked about this at Talk:Cancer research.

I think Wikipedia articles should be up-to-date with relevant adequately-integrated brief scientific information. Please comment if you have any feedback or idea about
 * if, where and how info about these three studies and their broader topics (these could then be examples) should get added, or
 * if, where and how info about such cancer research progress more generally should get added, or
 * the proposed Timeline of biomarkers

Prototyperspective (talk) 18:29, 20 February 2022 (UTC)


 * => A timeline article for biomarkers may not be the best approach, but I think enabling such, including on Wikipedia (e.g. it could also be enabled via Scholia and/or a dedicated collaborative biomarkers/screening database website), could still be useful and appropriate – for example a table with a column for the date could also be sorted by the date to show progress chronologically (rows with nonviable biomarkers and/or cancer screening progress could get trimmed).
 * => A suitable place to start with this could be Biomarker (medicine) which could/should be expanded.
 * => It could also be added to a new article like Cancer screening research that is parallel and similar to Spinal cord injury research. Note that it should be maintained and use scientific reviews whenever possible. I won't create any such article and would at most add a few updates to it.


 * The February section of the 2022 in science article currently has this:
 * "Progress in cancer screening is reported: DNA methylation biomarkers for breast cancer (WID-BC-index; 1 Feb.) and ovarian cancer (WID-OC-index; 1 Feb.) as well as lipidomics biomarkers for lung cancer (MS-based rapid targeted assay for levels of nine lipids in blood; 2 Feb.)."
 * --Prototyperspective (talk) 10:01, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
 * The February section of the 2022 in science article currently has this:
 * "Progress in cancer screening is reported: DNA methylation biomarkers for breast cancer (WID-BC-index; 1 Feb.) and ovarian cancer (WID-OC-index; 1 Feb.) as well as lipidomics biomarkers for lung cancer (MS-based rapid targeted assay for levels of nine lipids in blood; 2 Feb.)."
 * --Prototyperspective (talk) 10:01, 22 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Update for #March:


 * "Progress in biomarkers-based cancer screening is reported: researchers estimate risks for prostate cancer based on age, PSA and hK2 (7 Mar). Researchers achieve high prediction accuracy for pancreatic cancer using faecal microbiota biomarkers (8 Mar). A cancer test that checks for more mutations than ever before in one tissue sample is launched by a biotech-company (15 Mar). The first clinical test of a technology to detect early-stage cancer via novel biomarkers of extracellular vesicles concludes with promising results, possibly reaching screening-relevant sensitivities at high specificity at least for pancreatic cancer (17 Mar)."


 * --Prototyperspective (talk) 17:27, 24 April 2022 (UTC)