Urinary PGE-M: A promising cancer biomarker

Cancer prevention, early diagnosis, and targeted therapies are the keys to success in better cancer control and treatment. A big challenge remains to identify biomarkers for predicting who may have higher cancer risk and are able to respond to certain chemopreventive agents as well as for assessing a patient's response during treatment. Although a large body of evidence indicates that chronic inflammation is a risk factor for cancer, it is unclear whether inflammatory biomarkers can be used to predict cancer risk, progression, and death. Considering the importance of the proinflammatory COX-2-derived prostaglandin E₂ (PGE₂) in inflammation and cancer, Morris and colleagues found that urinary PGE-M is positively associated with obesity, smoking, and lung metastases in patients with breast cancer (4). Along the same lines, Kim and colleagues showed a potential association between urinary PGE-M and breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women (beginning on page 511). In agreement with previous reports, their findings indicate that urinary PGE-M may serve as a promising biomarker for prognosticating cancer risk and disease progression.