Functional Proteomics-Based Ovarian Cancer Biomarkers.

摘要

Although the immediate effectors of cell function are proteins, the absence of a practical high-throughput approach to explore protein activation has resulted in a reliance on genomic studies for biomarker identification. Comprehensive analysis of the genome and transcriptome in cancer does not capture all levels of biological complexity. Protein function is also dependent on posttranslational modifications. Functional proteomic analysis has the potential to effectively characterize ovarian cancer molecular heterogeneity. As new targeted therapeutics become available, predicting appropriate therapies will also be difficult without functional proteomic analysis. The lack of a validated practical, high-throughput functional proteomics platform remains a barrier to the identification and validation of useful ovarian cancer biomarkers. Reverse phase protein arrays (RPPA) offer a novel emerging approach to quantitative profiling of the levels and activation of multiple proteins in ovarian cancer cells and patient samples obstacles to the application of RPPA to the study of human ovarian cancers. In this study, we expanded the number of potential functional biomarkers by validating commercial antibodies for use with RPPA. We also tested 482 ovarian tumors and compared them to the ovarian cell line data.