title: Building and validating a prognostic index for biomarker studies.
abstract: An important aspect of modern cancer research is identifying molecular and genetic markers that predict an individual's risk of recurrence and response to treatment. Increasingly, a large number of biomarkers are included in studies, even though at most a small proportion of them will be prognostic. This article considers the selection and validation of prognostic biomarkers, and proposes a method for building and validating a prognostic index based on potentially many markers. We use simulation to show that our proposed method controls false-positive rate while retaining reasonable power. The prognostic index gets its power from combining prognostic biomarkers. It can be very powerful even when there are few markers that are predictive.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics & Applied Mathematics, The University of Texas, M D Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
authors.forename: Xuelin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Swati
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Biswas
authors.forename: Elihu H
authors.initials: EH
authors.lastname: Estey
authors.forename: Donald A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Berry
mesh_terms: D015415:Biomarkers; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011379:Prognosis; D012720:Severity of Illness Index
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers