Candidate biomarkers in renal cell carcinoma

Although the human genome has been decoded, the knowledge about the pathogenesis of diseases including cancer is still limited. By focusing on renal cell carcinoma (RCC) we here summarize the data of various research groups analyzing the protein/peptide expression profiles of tumor lesions/cell lines or serum obtained from patients and respective controls. Different powerful approaches such as 2-DE, PROTEOMEX/SERPA/SPEARS, and T cell epitope discovery upon elution of MHC class I-bound peptides in combination with MS/LC-MS/MS revealed 500 differentially expressed proteins. The overlap in target recognition limits the pool to 299 unique protein identities, but only few thereof (12%) have been validated. The management, analysis, and interpretation of the distinct data sets derived from 27 publications required bioinformatic restructuring of the results. However, the comprehensive analysis of the results expands the knowledge about the pathophysiology of RCC in particular of the most prominent clear cell subtype by providing information on the differentially expressed proteins, their regulation status in RCC compared to normal kidney epithelium next to additional information on MHC-presented T cell epitopes and on serological targets. Despite the low number of validated differentially expressed proteins some of them might serve as candidate biomarkers for the diagnosis and/or as therapeutic targets.