Abstract
Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancer among men in the western societies. Many PCa patients bear tumors that will not threat their lives if left untreated or if treatment is delayed. Our inability for early identification of these patients has resulted in massive overtreatment. Therefore, there is a great need of finding biomarkers for patient stratification according to prognostic risk; as well as there is a need for novel targets that can allow the development of effective treatments for patients that progress to castration-resistant PCa. Most biomarkers in cancer are proteins, including the widely-used prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Recent developments in mass spectrometry allow the identification and quantification of thousands of proteins and posttranslational modifications from small amounts of biological material, including formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues, and biological fluids. Novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers have been identified in tissue, blood, urine, and seminal plasma of PCa patients, and new insights in the ethology and progression of this disease have been achieved using this technology. In this review, we summarize these findings and discuss the potential of this technology to pave the way toward the clinical implementation of precision medicine in PCa.
Highlights
Prostate cancer (PCa) leads the statistics in cancer diagnosis and cancer-related death among men in the western societies [1]
Current therapies, which are based on radiation or surgery for prostate-confined tumors and on androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) for locally advanced or metastatic presentations have demonstrated to be very effective in the management of the disease
It has become clear that the application of state-of-the-art mass spectrometry-based proteomics to PCa research can contribute to address these and other questions related the clinical management of PCa (Table 1)
Summary
Prostate cancer (PCa) leads the statistics in cancer diagnosis and cancer-related death among men in the western societies [1]. Many protein biomarkers and potential drug targets have been identified using mass spectrometry techniques [recently reviewed in Ref [28,29,30].]. This pioneer studies used proteomic methodologies with limited capacity to achieve great depth and most of these markers have not been further validated or implemented in the clinical setting. We aim to summarize the achievements regarding the use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics for large-scale profiling of PCa and discuss the potential use of this technology for the identification of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, as well as therapeutic targets
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