Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 11|pp 10844—10862

Aberrantly glycosylated integrin α3β1 is a unique urinary biomarker for the diagnosis of bladder cancer

Di Jin¹, Ruiyun Zhang¹, Haige Chen¹, Chong Li^2,³

¹Department of Urology, Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200127, China
²Core Facility for Protein Research, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
³Beijing Jianlan Institute of Medicine, Beijing 100190, China

Received: February 20, 2020Accepted: April 28, 2020Published: June 13, 2020

Copyright © 2020 Jin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Bladder cancer (BC) is the most common malignancy of the urinary tract. We developed a new and ELISA kit for detecting aberrantly glycosylated integrin α3β1 (AG31) in human urine. We analysed urine samples (n=408) of patients with BC, renal cell carcinoma (RCC), prostate cancer (PC), cystitis, nephritis, and prostatitis from two centres in China. The subjects in the validation groups (n=2317) were recruited from other centres in China between July 2012 and September 2013. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to determine diagnostic accuracy. AG31 levels in urine samples were significantly higher in patients with BC than in any of the control subjects. Moreover, elevated levels of AG31 in urine could distinguish BC from benign inflammatory diseases. Finally, the urinary AG31 test was much more sensitive and specific than the NMP22 test. Therefore, the urinary AG31 test will provide an ideal and assay for the detection of BCs.