Peptidome profiling for the immunological stratification in sepsis: a proof of concept study

Abstract

Sepsis has been called the graveyard of pharmaceutical companies due to the numerous failed clinical trials. The lack of tools to monitor the immunological status in sepsis constrains the development of therapies. Here, we evaluated a test based on whole plasma peptidome acquired by MALDI-TOF-mass spectrometer and machine-learning algorithms to discriminate two lipopolysaccharide-(LPS) induced murine models emulating the pro- and anti-inflammatory/immunosuppression environments that can be found during sepsis. The LPS group was inoculated with a single high dose of LPS and the IS group was subjected to increasing doses of LPS, to induce proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory/immunosuppression profiles respectively. The LPS group showed leukopenia and higher levels of cytokines and tissue damage markers, and the IS group showed neutrophilia, lymphopenia and decreased humoral response. Principal component analysis of the plasma peptidomes formed discrete clusters that mostly coincided with the experimental groups. In addition, machine-learning algorithms discriminated the different experimental groups with a sensitivity of 95.7% and specificity of 90.9%. Data reveal the potential of plasma fingerprints analysis by MALDI-TOF-mass spectrometry as a simple, speedy and readily transferrable method for sepsis patient stratification that would contribute to therapeutic decision-making based on their immunological status.

Discrimination of the chemotherapy resistance status of human leukemia and glioblastoma cell lines by MALDI-TOF-MS profiling

“…The best-extracted peaks were then used to run a hierarchical k-means clustering-Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with the Factoextra R package 42 . The binary distance was used to measure dissimilarity between observations, ward.D2 was the agglomeration method used, and k was set to 2 or 3, considering the displayed levels in comparison 43 .…”

Discrimination of the chemotherapy resistance status of human leukemia and glioblastoma cell lines by MALDI-TOF-MS profiling

“…The best-extracted peaks were then used to run a hierarchical k-means clustering-Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with the Factoextra R package 40 . The binary distance was used to measure dissimilarity between observations, ward.D2 was the agglomeration method used, and k was set to 2 or 3, considering the displayed levels in comparison 41 .…”