Article Resource: Cancer Center
Writer: Office of Cancer Center Editor: Huang Aicheng
Published Time: 10:17 21/03/2011

The research team led by Professor Liu Qiang from the Cancer Center discovered the serum marker for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). This finding would enable the prognosis assessment of patients with NPC and whose study results were published in the renowned international magazine The Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is a kind of malignant tumor grew in the mucosa of nasopharynx, the victims of which are mainly middle-aged people. Its pathogen is related to elements such as racial susceptibility, genetic cause and the virus EB. Former researches showed that almost all of the NPC patients were infected with virus EB simultaneously; therefore, through the detection of certain type of antibodies in the serum the doctors could draw important references for the judgment of prognosis.

The research team led by Professor Liu Qiang has collected nearly 1300 medical records of NPC patients through drawing on the clinical resources of the Tumor Hospital affiliated to Sun Yat-sen University and working with the researchers from the Faculty of Medicine, Chinese University of Hong Kong. After analyzing the concentration of EBV-DNase in these patients’ serum and comparing the correlation of it with the rate of five-year and ten-year survival, they discovered that this indicator was of great significance to both the prognosis assessment as well as the disease monitoring.

The researchers found that after combining with the traditional tumor TNM, the percentages of five-year and ten-year survival of the patients who had high TNM rates while whose concentrations of antibodies were relatively low were actually higher than those people with low TNM rates yet high antibodies concentrations, which demonstrated that the serum marker EBV-DNase had complementary effects with the traditional nasopharyngeal carcinoma TNM. The results of this study are important to the prognosis assessment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.