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.