Development of candidate biomarkers for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma using multiple reaction monitoring

Abstract

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the fourth most frequent cause of cancer mortality in the United States. Because CA 19-9 increases not only in PDAC, but also in benign conditions, there is urgent need for an additional PDAC biomarker. Isotope tags for relative and absolute quantification (iTRAQ) were performed using 6 pairs of PDAC and normal tissues from the same patients, to obtain preliminary PDAC-specific proteins; and verification was performed by multiple reactions monitoring (MRM), using 30 PDAC and 20 normal serum, targeting high-abundant serum proteins without any pre-preparation. As a result, 17 candidate proteins from tissue iTRAQ were verified as potential markers (AUC values > 0.7). Multivariate analysis (MA) demonstrated that a 6-marker panel, consisting of alpha-1 antitrypsin, haptoglobin beta chain, hemopexin, transferrin, zinc alpha-2 glycoprotein, and apolipoprotein A4 from the MRM result, had comparable discriminatory power versus CA 19-9. Our study demonstrated that a combination of iTRAQ on PDAC tissue and verification MRM-MA on individual serum was an efficient method for the development of PDAC multimarkers.