[Novel tumor marker discovery of gastrointestinal cancers using various proteomic approaches]

Cancer has been the disease with the highest cause of death for a decade. This is partly due to the lack of ideal tumor markers for early diagnosis, which causes cancer found at the advanced stage where no curative treatment is available. Therefore, development of tumor markers with higher sensitivity and specificity is waiting to emerge. The ideal source for the tumor markers are serum, plasma or urine samples that are routinely used as clinical laboratory test. They contain a number of proteins that could be useful for cancer diagnosis. Recent advances in proteomic technology made it possible to identify the low abundant proteins in the clinical samples and thus extensive efforts are now attempted to search for the tumor markers across the country. There are two prominent types of proteomic approaches, 2D gel-based (2DE) and MS/MS based approach. 2DE is favorable to analyze relatively high moleculer weight proteins (MW > 20kD) and MS is superior to detect low molecular proteins or peptides. In this article, we introduce our recent studies on tumor marker discovery using various proteomic approaches and will discuss future application for cancer