Chapter 9 - Cancer proteomics: Application of case studies in diverse cancers

Abstract

Cancer is considered as a deadly, costly, and frightening disease. It devastates the life of patients as well as their families, both emotionally and economically. Diagnosing the disease at the early stage is highly beneficial for treating this deadly disease. There are different types of cancers that have been found to devastate lives, irrespective of age, color, ethnicity, and sex (except very few types which are sex and age specific). The different forms of cancer that we have focused on are gastric carcinoma, esophageal carcinoma, prostate carcinoma, ovarian carcinoma, breast carcinoma, and genitourinary and lung carcinoma. For proteomic study, different techniques were employed like fast mass spectrometry, significance analysis of microarray (SAM), tandem mass tag (TMT) based on proteomic analysis, liquid chromatography electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (LC–EMIMS/MS), western blotting, ELISA, MALDI-TOFeMS, LC–ESIeMS/MS, etc. In different types of cancers, different proteomic landscapes were identified. By employing different techniques and platforms, differential gene expression was identified in case vs. control studies. At some instances, some proteins were found to be upregulated among cancer cases, and some were found to be downregulated in control group. Similarly, expression levels of some were found to be downregulated in cancer cases, whereas some were upregulated in cancer cases. These studies identified various reliable proteomic biomarkers which possibly could be helpful in drug designing, identification of target protein(s) as well as understanding the pathophysiology of different types of cancers. This would ultimately lead to lessen the devastation of lives, and help reduce the economic burden as well.