Increased circulating cell signalling phosphoproteins in sera are useful for the detection of pancreatic cancer
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Published on: November 5, 2020
S Takano1, K Sogawa, H Yoshitomi
1Department of General Surgery, Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University, 1-8-1 Inohana, Chuo-ku, Chiba 260-8670, Japan. stakano@faculty.chiba-u.jp
Background:
Intracellular phosphoprotein activation significantly regulates cancer progression. However, the significance of circulating phosphoproteins in the blood remains unknown. We investigated the serum phosphoprotein profile involved in pancreatic cancer (PaCa) by a novel approach that comprehensively measured serum phosphoproteins levels, and clinically applied this method to the detection of PaCa.
Methods:
We analysed the serum phosphoproteins that comprised cancer cellular signal pathways by comparing sera from PaCa patients and benign controls including healthy volunteers (HVs) and pancreatitis patients.
Results:
Hierarchical clustering analysis between PaCa patients and HVs revealed differential pathway-specific profiles. In particular, the components of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) signalling pathway were significantly increased in the sera of PaCa patients compared with HVs. The positive rate of p-ERK1/2 (82%) was found to be superior to that of CA19-9 (53%) for early stage PaCa. For the combination of these serum levels, the area under the receiver-operator characteristics curves was showing significant ability to distinguish between the two populations in independent validation set, and between cancer and non-cancer populations in another validation set.
Conclusion:
The comprehensive measurement of serum cell signal phosphoproteins is useful for the detection of PaCa. Further investigations will lead to the implementation of tailor-made molecular-targeted therapeutics.
