Autoantibodies against intracellular antigens have been described in many types of human cancer. How the intracellular molecules participate in the malignant transformation process and whether a similar mechanism in autoimmune diseases may be involved in humoral immune responses in cancer remains to be investigated. The rationale is that intracellular proteins which are involved in carcinogenesis are provoking autoantibody responses and therefore autoantibodies can be used as probes in immunoscreening cDNA expression libraries and proteomic approach to isolate and identify proteins which might potentially be involved in malignant transformation.

Cancer has long been recognized as a multi-step process which involves not only genetic changes conferring growth advantage but also factors which disrupt regulation of growth and differentiation. It is possible that some of these factors could be identified and their functions evaluated with the aid of autoantibodies arising during tumorigenesis. First, we will determine whether it is possible to distinguish between antigens which are related to carcinogenesis and those which are related to other cellular processes such as proliferation or regeneration. Second, we will identify tumor-associated antibody-antigen systems that are potentially useful for the early detection of cancer, and then evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of different antigen-antibody systems as markers in cancer for further developing "tumor-associated antigen array" system for cancer diagnosis, prediction, and for following the response of patients to treatment.

Based on the data from the TexasCancerDataCenterwww.txcancer.org), the death rate of liver cancer for all races in Texas ( in 1998 was 7.36 (per 100,000) in male and 3.16 in female. However, the death rate of liver cancer in Hispanic was 13.67 in male and 5.80 in female, which was the highest one compared to other ethnic groups (For example, the death rates of liver cancer in White male and female were 5.35 and 2.53, respectively). Which factors were the important risk factors in the development of liver cancer in Hispanic population remained unknown. In this project, we propose to carry out a case-control study to investigate risk factors in the development of liver cancer in Hispanic population.