Discover, Develop & Validate--Advance and Prospect of Tumor Biomarkers.

Tumor biomarkers can serve as tools for early detection, diagnosis, prognosis, therapeutic target, response predicting, therapy monitoring of tumors or can be used as surrogate endpoints. Their abilities to assist various clinical decisions make them indispensable tools for current oncotherapies. Therefore, in the past decades, significant effort has been put into finding sensitive, specific, noninvasive, inexpensive, and clinically feasible tumor biomarkers. This review will summarize the recent progress made in different kinds of tumor biomarkers, introduce a promising and versatile novel tumor biomarker called DEK oncoprotein, and lastly, discuss the prospects of tumor biomarkers.