Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have shown that analysis of the proteomics, or all the protein data, from aggressive human cancers is a useful approach to identify potential novel therapeutic targets. The scientists reported their findings in an article published online on February 24, 2021 in Oncogene (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41388-021-01681-0), the identification of "proteomic signatures" that are associated with clinical measures of aggressive disease for each of the seven cancer types studied. Some signatures were shared between different types of cancer and included cellular pathways of altered metabolism. Importantly, experimental results provided proof-of-concept that their proteomics analysis approach is a valuable strategy to identify potential therapeutic targets. The Oncogene article is titled “Mass-Spectrometry-Based Proteomic Correlates of Grade and Stage Reveal Pathways and Kinases Associated With Aggressive Human Cancers.” "There are two notable aspects of this study. One is that we explored the proteomic landscape of cancer looking for proteins that were expressed in association with aggressive forms of cancer," said co-corresponding author Chad Creighton (photo), PhD, Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of Cancer Bioinformatics at the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor. "We analyzed protein data that included tens of thousands of proteins from about 800 tumors including seven different cancer types--breast, colon, lung, renal, ovarian, uterine, and pediatric glioma--made available by the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) mass-spectrometry-based proteomics datasets."Login Or Register To Read Full Story