Surfaceome Profiling Of Advanced Prostate Cancer To Identify Target Antigens For Immune-Based Therapy
SUMMARY
Dr. Witte and colleagues at UCLA have developed a novel approach to identify surface biomarkers and targetable antigens in prostate cancer by combining multiple omics analyses across different cell lines.
BACKGROUND
Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer diagnosed in men. Despite the prevalence of this disease, the heterogeneity and plasticity of advanced prostate cancer has hindered the identification of therapeutic targets. Previously identified cell-surface targets for prostate cancer appear to vary in expression between different cancer subtypes. Adding to this, cancer biomarkers and protein targets are notoriously difficult to validate and rarely succeed in being approved for the clinic.
In recent years, the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques and mass spectrometry (MS) have provided detailed information about gene and protein expression profiles in disease, respectively. These tools produce data with high sensitivity and have become the basis for gene/protein identification platforms throughout the medical field. However, novel strategies utilizing these tools are necessary to further develop their use for therapeutic target identification in cancer.
INNOVATION
UCLA researchers have developed an analytical method to identify potential surface biomarkers and therapeutic targets that utilizes data from both NGS and MS analyses. The combination of these two datasets is rare due to the limited sensitivity of MS data as compared to RNA-sequencing. This approach was capable of identifying novel surface proteins that are specific to different subtypes of prostate cancer.
APPLICATIONS
- Surface protein biomarker identification for various diseases
- Identification of therapeutic targets in different diseases
ADVANTAGES
- Identification of high-confidence protein targets
- Targets identified are specific enough to distinguish cancer subtypes
STATE OF DEVELOPMENT
The researchers have demonstrated this approach to work in identifying target proteins in different prostate cancer lines. These targets were validated for potential therapy and the results are expected to be submitted for publication soon.