Abstract 4704: Correlation between serum cytokine/angiogenic factors (CAFs) and tumor markers in testicular germ cell tumor patients.
Authors: Svetlovska Daniela , Mego Michal , Cholujova Dana , Gronesova Paulina , Palacka Patrik , Vanda Usakova , Miskovska Vera , Vetrakova-Krakovska Bibiana , Luha Jan , Mardiak Jozef 
Published: August 2014

Background: There is an unmet need for noninvasive markers to identify patients with TGCTs most likely to benefit from treatment and to measure the effects of therapies. Cytokines can be easily identified and they have an important role on tumor initiation, growth, and progression. Prognostic and predictive values of 52 plasma CAFs in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma were recently investigated. Our endpoint was to find out relationship between established tumor markers beta-human choriogonadrotropin (HCG) and alphafetoprotein (AFP) with CAFs.

Methods: We enrolled 47 patients with TGCTs treated by 1st line platinum based systemic chemotherapy. All patients received G-CSF support after chemotherapy (44 patients pegfilgrastim, 3 patients filgrastim). Fifty one plasma CAFs were analyzed before the 1st (47 patients) and before the 2nd cycle of chemotherapy (22 patients) using multiplex bead arrays (Human Group I and II cytokine panels and TGF beta by Bio-Plex 200 system, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA). HCG and AFP were measured by enhanced chemiluminescence immunoassay. CAFs were correlated to pretreatment serum levels of HCG and AFP. Spearman's correlation test was used to analyze the relationship between CAFs and tumor markers. We considered p &lt;0.05 to be significant.

Results: Median pretreatment AFP and HCG were 2.6 U/ml (range 0.9-13936.0 U/ml) and 5.5 mIU/ml (range 0.0-564261.0 mIU/ml), respectively. By the correlation analyses 4 from 51 pretreatment plasma CAFs were negatively and one positively correlated to pretreatment AFP. Negatively correlated CAFs were TGF-b1 (p=0.041), TGF-b3 (p=0.040), IL-7 (p=0.039) and G-CSF (p=0.016), positive correlation between pretreatment MIF (p=0.005) and pretreatment values of AFP was observed. We investigated, that pretreatment HCG had positive correlation to IL-2Ra (p=0.031), MIG (p=0.015), SCGF-b (p=0.045) and b-NGF (p=0.017), there was no negative elevation of pretreatment CAFs in correlation with pretreatment HCG. Additionally, we calculated ratio between pretreatment and postreatment values of CAFs. We investigated, that pretreatment HCG positively correlated to ratio values of several CAFs (IL-2Ra, p=0.009; IL-16, p=0.046; IL-18, p=0.014; SCGF-b, p=0.018; CTACK, p=0.004) and pretreatment AFP to RANTES (p=0.035), no negative relationships were observed.

Conclusions: Several serum CAFs with significant correlation to pretreatment AFP and HCG were identified in this study. We suppose that this finding may be useful for further investigations, biological and clinical consequences of this correlation have to be find out.

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-0016-11.

Citation Format: Daniela Svetlovska, Michal Mego, Dana Cholujova, Paulina Gronesova, Patrik Palacka, Usakova Vanda, Vera Miskovska, Bibiana Vetrakova-Krakovska, Jan Luha, Jozef Mardiak. Correlation between serum cytokine/angiogenic factors (CAFs) and tumor markers in testicular germ cell tumor patients. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4704. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-4704