ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1627130
This article is part of the Research TopicOmics, Vaccines, and Immune Diseases: From Bench to Bedside – Advancing Clinical Immunology through Multi-Omics and Personalized MedicineView all articles
Diagnostic accuracy evaluation of individual or combinational fecal immunochemical test, M3 gene, KRAS mutation and tumor methylation burden in colorectal carcinoma
Provisionally accepted
- 1Electric Power Teaching Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
- 2Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University, School of Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
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Objective: This study is aimed to develop multivariate prediction method in colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis. Methodology: M3 gene expression was determined using Fecal DNA extraction kits and performed by qRT-PCR. Methylation-burden and KRAS-mutation were detected by using the corresponding kits. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis and the area under the curve (AUC) was calculated to evaluate diagnostic performance using SPSS software. Results: 197 of CRC samples were enrolled to screen the best predictive combination among fecal immunochemical test (FIT), M3 expression and KRAS-mutation in faeces, and Methylation-burden in blood. Single factor analysis showed that M3 expression showed the best diagnosis performance and fecal immunochemical test (FIT) showed the lowest AUC. Combination of two makers universally enhanced diagnostic performance, of which Methylation-burden and M3 alliance displayed the highest AUC value. Interestingly, combination of M3, Methylation-burden and KRAS-mutation reached the best performance for all patients (AUC: 0.920), especially for early CRC patients (AUC: 0.931), which possessed the same predictive efficiency with the combination of four factors. Conclusion: Combined application of M3, Methylation-burden and KRAS-mutation might be the most reliable method for early CRC diagnosis.
Keywords: colorectal carcinoma, fecal immunochemical test, M3, KRAS mutation, tumor methylation burden
Received: 12 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xu, Chen, Niu, Zhao, Wu, Li and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shana Zhang, Electric Power Teaching Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
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