The EPIC-Norfolk Study
A Prospective Study Consortium for the Discovery and Validation of Early Detection Markers for Ovarian Cancer - Baseline Findings for CA125.
Clinical cancer research : an official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research 2025 ; 31: 2441-2453.
Kaaks R, Cooley V, Mukama T, Teras LR, Patel AV, Masala G, Crous-Bou M, Harris HR, Langseth H, Surcel HM, Wentzensen N, Terry K, Sasamoto N, Tworoger S, and Fortner RT
DOI : 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-24-1845
PubMed ID : 40227208
PMCID :
Abstract
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is a lethal malignancy. Cancer antigen 125 (CA125), the "best" available marker for detecting EOC, has insufficient sensitivity and specificity for earlier-stage disease and is not a meaningful screening tool, motivating the search for further biomarkers. Cancer biomarker discovery is enhanced by "omics" technologies. Discovery studies for EOC biomarkers should be conducted in prediagnosis blood samples from prospective cohorts to maximize the likelihood of identifying markers that can detect disease before usual diagnosis and in earlier disease stage while reducing methodologic biases.
Individual cohorts with prediagnosis blood samples have insufficient sample size for such studies. Thus, we established "Prospective Early Detection Consortium for Ovarian Cancer" ("PREDICT")-a collaboration of nine prospective studies-to assemble a sufficient number of EOC cases with blood samples collected ≤18 months before diagnosis plus controls. The 457 cases and 1,687 controls have circulating CA125 measured using a clinical assay.
The discrimination capacity for single CA125 measurements in samples collected <6 months prior to diagnosis was high (AUC; PREDICT overall = 0.92; range across cohorts of nonpregnant individuals = 0.89-0.98) and declined with extended time between blood collection and diagnosis. Between-cohort variability in CA125 levels and predictive performance was observed.
Ongoing investigations in PREDICT are evaluating the early detection potential of tumor-associated autoantibodies and miRNAs using CA125 as a benchmark. PREDICT is a well-characterized resource for identifying and validating detection markers for EOC that may then be used in multimodal screening as a complement to CA125 and combined with imaging.