Background: Evaluation of circulating anti-p53 antibodies is an easy-to-perform, widely employed, procedure to assess the p53 status in cancer patients.
Materials and methods: Levels of circulating anti-p53 antibodies in patients affected either by oral SCC or by pre- malignant oral lesions were assayed using a commercial ELISA kit. Autoantibody titers to Hsp60 and Hsp72 were determined by conventional ELISA.
Results: Anti-p53 antibodies were detected in 3 out of 16 SCC-bearing patients (18.7%) and in 9 out of 13 patients suffering from pre-malignant oral lesions (69.2%). High titers of anti-Hsp60 autoantibodies were detected in 3 out of 29 patients (10.3%), while in all patients anti-Hsp72 titers were in the normal range.
Conclusion: The presence of anti-p53 antibodies in both SCC-bearing patients and in patients with pre-malignant lesions support the notion that p53 gene mutation is an early event in oral tumorigenesis and suggest that this assay could be useful for diagnostic screening of pre-neoplastic lesions at high risk of recurrence and/or transition towards overt malignancy.