Data from: An eighteen serum cytokine signature for discriminating glioma from normal healthy individuals

Glioblastomas (GBM) are largely incurable as they diffusely infiltrate
adjacent brain tissues and are difficult to diagnose at early stages.
Biomarkers derived from serum, which can be obtained by minimally invasive
procedures, may help in early diagnosis, prognosis and treatment
monitoring. To develop a serum cytokine signature, we profiled 48
cytokines in sera derived from normal healthy individuals (n = 26) and
different grades of glioma patients (n = 194). We divided the normal and
grade IV glioma/GBM serum samples randomly into equal sized training and
test sets. In the training set, the Prediction Analysis for Microarrays
(PAM) identified a panel of 18 cytokines that could discriminate GBM sera
from normal sera with maximum accuracy (95.40%) and minimum error (4.60%).
The 18-cytokine signature obtained in the training set discriminated GBM
sera from normal sera in the test set as well (accuracy 96.55%; error
3.45%). Interestingly, the 18-cytokine signature also differentiated grade
II/Diffuse Astrocytoma (DA) and grade III/Anaplastic Astrocytoma (AA) sera
from normal sera very efficiently (DA vs. normal–accuracy 96.00%, error
4.00%; AA vs. normal–accuracy 95.83%, error 4.17%). Kyoto Encyclopedia of
Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis using 18 cytokines resulted in
the enrichment of two pathways, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction and
JAK-STAT pathways with high significance. Thus our study identified an
18-cytokine signature for distinguishing glioma sera from normal healthy
individual sera and also demonstrated the importance of their differential
abundance in glioma biology.