LecT-Hepa facilitates estimating treatment outcome during interferon therapy in chronic hepatitis C patients

Abstract

BackgroundA combination treatment of interferon and ribavirin is the standard and the commonly used treatment for chronic hepatitis C (CHC). Developing noninvasive tests like serum indicators that can predict treatment outcome at an early stage of therapy is beneficial for individualized treatment and management of CHC. A glyco-indicator based on the glyco-alteration of serum α1-acid glycoprotein, LecT-Hepa, was discovered by glycomics technologies as a robust indicator of liver fibrosis. Here, we investigated the clinical utility of LecT-Hepa for evaluation of treatment outcome.ResultsFirstly, ninety-seven patients with CHC were used for comparison of LecT-Hepa in serum and plasma. We found no significant difference in the concentrations of LecT-Hepa in serum and plasma. And then, 213 serum specimens from 45 patients who received 48 weeks of treatment with interferon and ribavirin were followed up for 96 weeks, and were used for evaluation of the role of LecT-Hepa. We found that LecT-Hepa might reflect the change in fibrosis regression during the treatment process. Moreover, the change of LecT-Hepa at the first 12 weeks of treatment could already predict the antiviral treatment response, which was more superior to FIB-4 index and aspartate aminotransferase-to-platelet ratio index (APRI) in this study.ConclusionsThese results provide a new perspective that serum glycoprotein could be used as a joint diagnosis indicator for estimation treatment outcome of viral hepatitis at earlier stage of therapy.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1559-0275-11-44) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Lectin Bead Array in a Single Tip Facilitates Fully Automatic Glycoprotein Profiling

“…Using this system, we obtained a glycan profile of an endogenous glycoprotein, AGP, which is a potential glyco-biomarker for liver fibrosis . In previous reports, serum AGP was enriched using a 12-plex autopipetting robot and then subjected to 45-plex lectin microarray or 3-plex lectin–antibody sandwich assay using a fully automatic clinical analyzer, HISCL. − A similar trend was obtained for another endogenous protein, membrane-tethered MUC1, enriched from cell lysate . To obtain the binding signals efficiently using a small amount of the endogenous protein, the binding reaction was extended from 5 to 60 min with consecutive mixing using an autopipetting robot.…”