On the Road to Accurate Protein Biomarkers in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis: Current Status and Future Advances

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This review by Yan et al., discusses the advances, challenges and potential solutions for identifying and validating clinically useful protein biomarkers in PC diagnosis and prognosis. The review sets the stage for the clinical need for biomarkers in prostate cancer diagnosis and very nicely elaborates upon the currently available biomarkers as well as discusses various approaches such as proteomics, PEA and RRPA etc. to identify novel protein biomarkers from clinical specimens. Alternative approaches such as computational biology have also been discussed. The authors have also identified the challenges and solutions to validate the protein biomarkers. The usage of tables and figures is apt to summarize each section. Overall this comprehensive review is clearly and accurately presented, well organized, well written, and ready for direct publication by the journal from my point of view. The flow of thoughts and language are optimum level and professional enough for direct consideration as an exceptional article. The author reviewed the literature successfully. My recommendation is to "accept" this article.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript is very interesting and well written. I did not find any problems. It can in my opinion be published as is. 

significance of content => the paper is a very clear review of protein based biomarkers, that allows the reader to clearly understand the interest and limits of each biomarker in each case. It also describes the main features of each method that may be used for biomarker discovery in a way that allows the reader to get a good understanding of the results from the literature. 

quality of presentation => the paper is clear and synthetic, figures are nicely presented and precise

scientific soundness => this paper is therefore a very clear and useful paper for readers