Objectives
Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), known collectively as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), are chronic immuno-inflammatory pathologies of unknown etiology. Despite the frequent utilization of biomarkers in medical practice, there is a relative lack of information regarding validated paediatric biomarkers for IBD. Further, biomarkers proved to be efficacious in adults are frequently extrapolated to the paediatric clinical setting without considering that the pathogenesis of many diseases is distinctly different in children. In the current study, proteomics technology was employed in order to monitor differences in protein expression among adult and children CD patients, in order to identify a panel of candidate protein biomarkers that might be used to improve prognostic-diagnostic accuracy and to advance paediatric medical care.
Methods
Male and female serum samples from 12 adults and 12 children with active CD were subjected to two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Following the relative quantitation of protein spots exhibiting a differential expression between the two groups by densitometry, the spots were further characterized by MALDI-TOF-MS. Results were confirmed by Western blot analysis.
Results
Clusterin (CLUS) was found to be significantly over-expressed in adults with CD, whereas ceruloplasmin (CERU) and apolipoprotein B-100 (APOB) were found to be significantly over-expressed in children indicating that the expression of these proteins might be implicated in the onset or progression of CD in these two sub-groups of patients.
Conclusions
Interestingly, we found a differential expression of several proteins in adults versus paediatric CD patients. Undoubtedly, future experiments using a larger cohort of CD patients are needed to evaluate the relevance of our preliminary findings.