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Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on October 7, 2008
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2008 100(20):1419-1420; doi:10.1093/jnci/djn339
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press.

EDITORIALS

The Process to Discover and Develop Biomarkers for Cancer: A Work in Progress

David F. Ransohoff

Affiliation of author: Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC

Correspondence to: David F. Ransohoff, MD, Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC (e-mail: ransohof@med.unc.edu).

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

The process to discover and develop molecular biomarkers for cancer diagnosis (or prognosis) is a work in progress and is evolving. "Discovery" research—searching for markers by use of high-throughput technology without an a priori hypothesis—has produced few useful biomarkers over the last 10 years despite numerous claims in research publications and news reports about "95% sensitivity and 95% specificity" or better. The degree of disconnect between claims and products should make us ask why progress is so slow: Is it the normal stop-and-start of science? Or is there some systemic problem with the process that we currently use to discover and develop markers? After all, it took decades to evolve the process to discover and develop . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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