Discovering cancer biomarkers from clinical samples by protein microarrays

Cancer biomarkers are of potential use in early cancer diagnosis, anticancer therapy development, and monitoring the responses to treatments. Protein-based cancer biomarkers are major forms in use, as they are much easier to be monitored in body fluids or tissues. For cancer biomarker discovery, high-throughput techniques such as protein microarrays hold great promises, because they are capable of global unbiased monitoring but with a miniaturized format. In doing so, novel and cancer type specific biomarkers can be systematically discovered at an affordable cost. In this review, we give a relatively complete picture on protein microarrays applied to clinical samples for cancer biomarker discovery, and conclude this review with the future perspectives.