Proteomic analysis of soft tissue sarcoma

Abstract

Soft tissue sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of malignant mesenchymal tumors, and novel tumors biomarkers and therapeutic targets are required to achieve early diagnosis and optimize therapy for individual patients. Global protein expression studies, an approach known as "proteomics", can offer important clues for understanding tumor biology that cannot be obtained by other approaches. Proteomic studies, such as two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) and mass spectrometry, have provided protein expression profiles of soft tissue tumors that can be used to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers and allow molecular classification of tumors. In this article, a brief description of the methodology will be provided, followed by a few examples of the recent proteomic studies that have generated new information for the diagnosis, classification and treatment of soft tissue tumors.

Proteomic Technologies to Develop Biomarkers and Functional Analyses for Bone and Soft Tissue Tumors

“…We routinely employ 2D-DIGE for biomarker identification using surgical samples [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. 2D-DIGE is an advanced variation of 2D-PAGE (two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis) that has the potential to address many of the drawbacks of classical 2D-PAGE [31,32].…”

“…These gel images provide data regarding protein spots as protein expression profiles. Protein spots whose intensity statistically differs between the groups examined are identified using software programs in each study [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Proteins corresponding to the spots of interest are identified using mass spectrometry.…”

“…Since the end of the 1990s, due to the development of high-throughput platforms, proteomics has allowed the simultaneous measurement of multiple protein products and protein modifications. Recently, our studies successfully identified various candidate proteins associated with the differential diagnosis [17,[19][20][21], prognosis [18,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and prediction of the response to chemotherapy [18,23,28] in patients with bone and soft tissue tumors. We also verified the predictive power of these variables using large validation cohorts to develop clinical applications of useful biomarkers.…”

“…Therefore, various technologies are now being employed to identify tumor-specific proteins in sarcomas using proteomics technologies. In this section, we briefly describe twodimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) and GeLC-MS [33,34], as these technologies are the most frequently used methods for obtaining protein expression profiles in our proteomic studies [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28].…”

Global proteomics and metabolomics in cancer biomarker discovery

“…Again, until these proteins are validated in independent studies, they cannot be considered clinically reliable. Recently, 2D‐DIGE was applied in the proteomic analysis of soft‐tissue sarcoma 34, ovarian cancer 35, stomach cancer 36 and colorectal cancer 37.…”