Validation of new, circulating biomarkers for gliomas

Background : Biomarkers are useful clinical tools but only a handful of them are used routinely for patient care. Despite intense efforts to discover new, clinically useful biomarkers, very few new circulating biomarkers were implemented in clinical practice in the last 40 years. This is mainly due to rather poor clinical performance. Methods : Here, our goal was to validate the performance of a group of newly discovered circulating biomarkers for glioma by comparing our data with data from a paper recently published in Science Advances. We analyzed our own sets of clinical samples (gliomas (n=30), meningiomas (n=20)) and a different analytical assay (Proximity Extension Assay, OLINK Proteomics) to compare the results of Shen and colleagues. Results : Despite the sophistication of the utilized discovery method by the original investigators, we found that the newly proposed biomarkers for glioma (the best one presumably being SERPINA6) did not perform as originally claimed. Conclusions : Scientific irreproducibility has been extensively discussed in the literature. A large proportion of newly discovered candidate biomarkers likely represent “false discovery” and significantly contribute to the propagation of irreproducible results between investigators. One of the best ways to assess the value of any new biomarker is by independent and extensive validation. Based on our previous classification of irreproducible results, we believe that this new work likely represents another example of biomarker false discovery.