PurposeCancer of the prostate (CaP) is the leading cancer among men in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A substantial proportion of these men with CaP are diagnosed at late (usually incurable) stages, yet little is known about the etiology of CaP in SSA.MethodsWe established the Men of African Descent and Carcinoma of the Prostate Network, which includes seven SSA centers partnering with five US centers to study the genetics and epidemiology of CaP in SSA. We developed common data elements and instruments, regulatory infrastructure, and biosample collection, processing, and shipping protocols. We tested this infrastructure by collecting epidemiologic, medical record, and genomic data from a total of 311 patients with CaP and 218 matched controls recruited at the seven SSA centers. We extracted genomic DNA from whole blood, buffy coat, or buccal swabs from 265 participants and shipped it to the Center for Inherited Disease Research (Baltimore, MD) and the Centre for Proteomics and Genomics Research (Cape Town, South Africa), where genotypes were generated using the UK Biobank Axiom Array.ResultsWe used common instruments for data collection and entered data into the shared database. Double-entered data from pilot participants showed a 95% to 98% concordance rate, suggesting that data can be collected, entered, and stored with a high degree of accuracy. Genotypes were obtained from 95% of tested DNA samples (100% from blood-derived DNA samples) with high concordance across laboratories.ConclusionWe provide approaches that can produce high-quality epidemiologic and genomic data in multicenter studies of cancer in SSA.
Systematic analysis of protein and enzyme function typically requires scale-up of protein expression and purification prior to assay development; this can often be limiting. Miniaturization of assays provides an alternative approach, but simple, generic methods are in short supply. Here we show how custom microarrays can be adapted to this purpose. We discuss the different routes to array fabrication and describe in detail one facile approach in which the purification and immobilization procedures are combined into a single step, significantly simplifying the array fabrication process. We illustrate this approach by reference to the creation of arrays of human protein kinases and of human cytochrome P450s. We discuss methods for both ligand-binding and turnover-based assays, as well as data analysis on such arrays.
The cancer-testis antigens are a group of unrelated proteins aberrantly expressed in various cancers in adult somatic tissues. This aberrant expression can trigger spontaneous immune responses, a phenomenon exploited for the development of disease markers and therapeutic vaccines. However, expression levels often vary amongst patients presenting the same cancer type, and these antigens are therefore unlikely to be individually viable as diagnostic or prognostic markers. Nevertheless, patterns of antigen expression may provide correlates of specific cancer types and disease progression. Herein, we describe the development of a novel, readily customizable cancer-testis antigen microarray platform together with robust bioinformatics tools, with which to quantify anti-cancer testis antigen autoantibody profiles in patient sera. By exploiting the high affinity between autoantibodies and tumor antigens, we achieved linearity of response and an autoantibody quantitation limit in the pg/mL range-equating to a million-fold serum dilution. By using oriented attachment of folded, recombinant antigens and a polyethylene glycol microarray surface coating, we attained minimal non-specific antibody binding. Unlike other proteomics methods, which typically use lower affinity interactions between monoclonal antibodies and tumor antigens for detection, the high sensitivity and specificity realized using our autoantibody-based approach may facilitate the development of better cancer biomarkers, as well as potentially enabling pre-symptomatic diagnosis. We illustrated the usage of our platform by monitoring the response of a melanoma patient cohort to an experimental therapeutic NY-ESO-1-based cancer vaccine; inter alia, we found evidence of determinant spreading in individual patients, as well as differential CT antigen expression and epitope usage.
Protective immunity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis is poorly understood. The role of interleukin (IL)-4, the archetypal T-helper type 2 (Th2) cytokine, in the immunopathogenesis of human tuberculosis remains unclear.Blood and/or bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BAL) were obtained from participants with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) (n=23) and presumed latent TB infection (LTBI) (n=22). Messenger RNA expression levels of interferon (IFN)-γ, IL-4 and its splice variant IL-4δ2 were determined by real-time PCR. The effect of human recombinant (hr)IL-4 on mycobacterial survival/containment (CFU·mL−1) was evaluated in M. tuberculosis-infected macrophages co-cultured with mycobacterial antigen-primed effector T-cells. Regulatory T-cell (Treg) and Th1 cytokine levels were evaluated using flow cytometry.In blood, but not BAL, IL-4 mRNA levels (p=0.02) and the IL-4/IFN-γ ratio (p=0.01) was higher in TB versus LTBI. hrIL-4 reduced mycobacterial containment in infected macrophages (p<0.008) in a dose-dependent manner and was associated with an increase in Tregs (p<0.001), but decreased CD4+Th1 cytokine levels (CD4+IFN-γ+ p<0.001; CD4+TNFα+ p=0.01). Blocking IL-4 significantly neutralised mycobacterial containment (p=0.03), CD4+IFNγ+ levels (p=0.03) and Treg expression (p=0.03).IL-4 can subvert mycobacterial containment in human macrophages, probably via perturbations in Treg and Th1-linked pathways. These data may have implications for the design of effective TB vaccines and host-directed therapies.
Protein microarrays have many potential applications in the systematic, quantitative analysis of protein function. However, simple, reproducible, and robust methods for array fabrication that are compatible with the study of large, custom collections of potentially unrelated proteins are required. Here, we discuss different routes to array fabrication and describe in detail one approach in which the purification and immobilisation procedures are combined into a single step, significantly simplifying the array fabrication process. We illustrate this approach by reference to the creation of an array of human protein kinases and discuss methods for assay and data analysis on such arrays.
The development of new drugs today is a hugely expensive process, with estimated costs of up to $1 billion to take a drug through to market. However, despite this seemingly massive expenditure, statistics show that the great majority of prescription drugs on the market today are only effective for around 40 % of the patients to whom they are administered. Worse still, recently there have been a series of high-profile instances where potentially block-busting FDA-approved drugs have subsequently been withdrawn due to unanticipated side effects that were only revealed when the drug entered use in the general population. A variety of factors are at play in underpinning such statistics, but at the heart of the problem is the fact that, despite the extensive knowledge being generated in the postgenomic era about the genetic differences between individuals, Western medicine still today largely ignores such differences. The hope therefore is that by gaining a greater understanding of the individual nature of disease progression and of drug response, we might move toward a new era of personalized medicine in which the right drug is prescribed at the right dose to treat the precise disease afflicting the specific patient. As a step along this road, this review will discuss new approaches in the pharmacogenomics field to understanding in a quantitative manner the molecular consequence of polymorphic variation and mutation, both on encoded protein function and on protein-drug interactions.
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