Pre-operative Circulating Plasma Gelsolin Predicts Residual Disease and Detects Early Stage Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer (OVCA) patients with suboptimal residual disease (RD) and advanced stages have poor survival. pGSN is an actin binding protein which protects OVCA cells from cisplatin-induced death. There is an urgent need to discover reliable biomarkers to optimize individualized treatment recommendations. 99 plasma samples with pre-determined CA125 were collected from OVCA patients and pGSN assayed using sandwich-based ELISA. Associations between CA125, pGSN and clinicopathological parameters were examined using Fisher’s exact test, T test and Kruskal Wallis Test. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard models were used to statistically analyze clinical outcomes. At 64 µg/ml, pGSN had sensitivity and specificity of 60% and 60% respectively, for the prediction of RD where as that of CA125 at 576.5 U/mL was 43.5% and 56.5% respectively. Patients with stage 1 tumor had increased levels of pre-operative pGSN compared to those with tumor stage >1 and healthy subjects (P = 0.005). At the value of 81 µg/mL, pGSN had a sensitivity and specificity of 75% and 78.4%, respectively for the detection of early stage OVCA. At the value of 0.133, the Indicator of Stage 1 OVCA (ISO1) provided a sensitivity of 100% at a specificity of 67% (AUC, 0.89; P < 0.001). In the multivariate Cox regression analysis, pGSN (HR, 2.00; CI, 0.99–4.05; P = 0.05) was an independent significant predictor of progression free survival (PFS) but not CA125 (HR, 0.68; CI, 0.41–1.13; P = 0.13). Pre-operative circulating pGSN is a favorable and independent biomarker for early disease detection, RD prediction and patients’ prognosis.