Biomarkers for personalized prevention in cancer: a rapid scoping review within the prophet project

Abstract

Background/Objectives: In the PeRsOnalized Prevention roadmap for the future HEalThcare (PROPHET) project, we assessed through a scoping review whether there is any biomarker or combination of biomarkers useful for personalized prevention -primary/secondaryof cancer. Methods: We performed a rapid scoping review (Feb-Jun 2023) following JBI quality recommendations. The population included adults (> 18 years) and specific subgroups defined by established risk factors (i.e., diabetes, smoking, etc.). The concept and context for the revision were: “Biomarkers that may help to stratify risk, in primary or in secondary prevention, of the main cancer sites (breast, lung, prostate, colon, bladder, rectum, pancreas, liver, stomach, corpus and cervix uteri)”. We searched for the literature available between 2020-2023 in bibliographic bases (Medline, EMBASE) and grey literature. The protocol is available in OSF (https://osf.io/wg62b/). Due to time constraints, screening and data extraction was done by two reviewers in 10% of the papers; the rest were screened by a single reviewer. A graphical interactive map was created to show the evidence gaps in the literature. Results: We identified a total of 11,361 records. After the exclusion of 2,361 duplicates, 20% of them (n = 1,838) were selected for the fulltext phase, and approximately 66% of those went to data extraction phase. Among tumours, the most researched were breast, lung, colorectal, and prostate cancer. Regarding the type of biomarker, most papers included integrated genetic/epigenetic biomarkers, while imaging techniques were less common. Finally, some manuscripts presented -omics-based biomarkers or reported artificial intelligence and/or deep learning approaches. We present the results separately for primary and secondary prevention, taking into account available evidence summarized by the European Code against Cancer. The report allows to have a global view of research on biomarkers, detailing study types, explored population (general or high-risk subgroups), specific type of biomarker and whether it may be of clinical utility. Conclusions/Recommendations: These results are the first step of the PROPHET project and will serve as a state of the art in biomarkers for personalized prevention of cancer. This work will contribute to develop a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the European Union.