Emerging Proteomic Technologies Provide Enormous and Underutilized Potential for Brain Cancer Research

Abstract

High-throughput technologies present immense opportunities to characterize brain cancer biology at a systems level. However, proteomic studies of brain cancers are still relatively scarce. Here we discuss the latest proteomic technologies, their application to profiling and quantitation of brain proteomes and how we expect these technologies will be applied to study brain cancer proteomes in the future. Mass spectrometry based proteomics with increased specificity, coverage and throughput will be pervasive in proteomics investigations of brain. Generated data needs to be captured by the curation of databases, and application of creative data analysis strategies is needed to provide meaningful insights into brain functions and associated pathologies. Overall, proteomics applications to brain cancers are in the earliest stages and the expanded use of these technologies holds enormous potential to improve our understanding of brain functions and pathologies. Molecular & Cellular Proteomics 15: 10.1074/mcp.R115.053884, 362-367, 2016.

Personalized Nutrition in Disrupting Cancer — Proceedings From the 2017 American College of Nutrition Annual Meeting

“…It is imperative to stratify diseases of this complexity for impedance match with emerging therapeutic regimens for better clinical outcomes. Systems approaches employing advanced technologies in genomics (for oncogenic mutations), epigenetics and transcriptomics (for aberrant gene regulatory networks), proteomics (for cancer biomarkers), and single cell analysis (for tumor cell subpopulations) have been applied to dissect tumor tissue heterogeneity in leukemia, brain tumors, and colorectal cancer (10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15). Moreover, cancer is a systemic disease that requires a comprehensive assessment of the whole body for better understanding of the disease pathophysiology and systematic impact from therapeutic interventions such as chemotherapy, radiation, targeted agents, and immune therapy.…”

Slow Off-Rate Modified Aptamer (SOMAmer) Proteomic Analysis of Patient-Derived Malignant Glioma Identifies Distinct Cellular Proteomes

“…Changes in protein composition and activity are major contributors to GBM progression, which includes proliferation and differentiation of GBM cells, their invasion into surrounding brain tissue, and the emergence of cellular mechanisms of therapeutic resistance. While large scale gene expression analysis of GBM identified distinct genetic subtypes and their molecular drivers [9][10][11], fewer proteomic studies have been performed on mostly smaller numbers of patient GBM tissues/cells or other brain tumors [12][13][14][15][16][17], with the exception of a most recent comparative proteogenomic and metabolomic analysis on 99 GBM tissue samples [18]. Currently, only a few proteins (and their mutated versions) are considered prognostic and predictive biomarkers for GBM and are used for prognosis stratification and selection of GBM patients for specific treatments [15,[19][20][21][22].…”