- 期刊
- OpenAccess
Use of Saliva Protein Biomarkers for Diagnosis of Oral Cavity Cancer
摘要
Oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is a common cancer worldwide and represents a serious and growing problem in many parts of the globe, including Taiwan. OSCC is the most common subtype of oral cavity cancer and most cases of OSCC develop from visible lesions known as oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMDs), which exhibit heterogeneous subtypes with different transformation potentials and thus complicate the early detection of OSCC during routine visual oral cancer screenings. To help early detection of OSCC, scientists have put efforts in the past decades to develop non-invasive clinical tests using saliva, a kind of protein-rich body fluid that directly contacts the oral lesions and represents an ideal source for discovery of effective OSCC biomarkers. There have been several reviews describing the research of salivary proteins, RNAs, DNAs and/or metabolites as candidate OSCC biomarkers in recent years. The present review focuses on the potential use of salivary proteins for early detection of OSCC, discussing about the saliva sampling strategies for biomarker discovery and verification, the updated list of candidate protein biomarkers for OSCC detection and monitoring (from OPMDs to OSCC), and the importance of saliva protein stability and variability in developing clinically applicable biomarkers of OSCC.