Lack of clinical utility of serum macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) for monitoring therapy response and estimating prognosis in advanced lung cancer.

Background: Lung cancer is a major burden to global health and is still among the most frequent and most lethal malignant diseases. Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is a proinflammatory cytokine involved in a variety of processes including tumorigenesis, formation of a tumor microenvironment and metastasis. It is therefore a potential prognostic biomarker in malignant diseases.

Objective: In this study, we investigated the applicability of MIF in serum samples as a biomarker in lung cancer.

Methods: In a retrospective approach, we analyzed the sera of 79 patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and 14 patients with small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) before the start of chemotherapy, as well as before the second and third chemotherapy cycle, respectively. Serum MIF levels were measured using a sandwich immunoassay with a sulfo-tag-labelled detection antibody, while pro-gastrin releasing peptide (proGRP) levels were determined with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.

Results: No difference in serum MIF levels between responders and non-responders to chemotherapy was observed at all time points, while proGRP levels were significantly lower in responders before the second chemotherapy cycle (p = 0.012). No differences in biomarker levels depending on the histopathological classification of NSCLC patients was found. Moreover, in ROC curve analyses MIF was not able to distinguish between responders and non-responders to therapy. proGRP could differentiate between responders and non-responders before the second chemotherapy cycle (p = 0.015) with sensitivities of 43% at 90% and 95% specificity, respectively. Likewise, proGRP yielded significantly longer survival times of patients with low proGRP concentrations before the second chemotherapy cycle (p = 0.015) in Kaplan-Meier analyses, yet MIF showed no significant differences in survival times at all time points. Comparison with the biomarkers CEA and CYFRA 21-1 in the same cohort showed that these established biomarkers clearly performed superior to MIF and proGRP.

Conclusions: From the present results, there is no indication that serum MIF may serve as a biomarker in prognosis and monitoring of response to therapy in lung cancer. Limitations of this study include its retrospective design, the inclusion of a larger NSCLC and a smaller SCLC subgroup, the classical chemotherapeutic treatment, the use of a non-diagnostic immunoassay (RUO-test) for MIF measurement and the lack of a validation cohort. Strengths of the study are its highly standardized procedures concerning sample collection, preanalytic treatment, measurements and quality control of the laboratory assays.