Spectra of antinuclear antibodies in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the lung and of the head and neck

Squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (HNSCC) and of the lung (LSCC) share some important risk factors, but differ substantially in terms of prognosis and treatment. A pulmonary nodule developing in patients with surgically cured HNSCC may pose a diagnostic dilemma. Markers able to distinguish these two common malignancies would be of major clinical importance. In this work we compared the spectrum of antinuclear antibodies (ANA) from 22 patients with SCCL to that of 40 patients with HNSCC. Patient sera were used to probe immunoblots of nuclear extracts from all four major lung cancer cell types, normal lung fibroblasts, cells cultured from a HNSCC, and keratinocytes cultured from the field cancerization. The ability to classify retrospectively LSCC from HNSCC based on serum ANA reactivities was determined by recursive partitioning analyses. We found that while both malignancies share reactivities to a small group of nuclear antigens, other reactivities are directed against proteins uniquely or preferentially expressed in either SCCL or in SCCHN cells. Our work shows that autoimmunity is a prominent feature of squamous cell carcinoma and suggests that molecular characterization of nuclear antigens recognized by ANAs may lead to the discovery of markers valuable to distinguish LSCC from HNSCC.