Patent ID: 7863004

Claim:
A method of detecting informative markers of early stage cancer by: differentially biopanning sera obtained from normal individuals and patients with early stage cancer against epitope-expressing phage display libraries; obtaining epitope bearing clones displaying reactivity to antibodies present in sera of patients with early stage cancer but not in sera of normal individuals, including the step of identifying and excluding the sera of normal individuals that react strongly but nonspecifically to epitope bearing clones, wherein the step of excluding the sera of normal individuals which react strongly but nonspecifically to epitope bearing clones further includes the step of excluding sera which show a unimodal pattern of dual fluorescence reaction with epitope bearing clones, where a first color indicates reaction with human immunoglobulin and a second color indicates reaction to phage capsid proteins; identifying all epitopes that are specific to patients with early stage cancer as informative markers of early stage cancer; and including all epitopes identified as informative markers in a microarray assay designed to detect early stage cancer.