Japanese Clinical Medicine

Melanoma is one of lethal malignant skin tumors and the sole effective cure for the disease can be achieved by surgical resection of primary tumor and early diagnosis for melanoma is crucial for patients' prognosis. Detection of novel tumor-related antibodies would aid in the diagnosis of early-stage cancer, in the detection of recurrence and in the development of a more effective immunotherapy. In the middle of the exploration of a candidate of biomarker for melanoma by proteomics-base technique, we encountered the coexistence of autoantibodies for a-enolase and g-enolase in serum derived from a patient with melanoma, who had received the repeated treatments with alkylating agents and interferon b. Although melanoma is known to be a highly antigenic tumor, it is still unclear why these autoantibodies appeared.To evaluate the usefulness in detecting the circulating a-enolase or g-enolase autoantibodies in serum from melanoma patients for biomarkers for tumor progression, more studies are needed.