Consistency of a two clinical site sample collection: a proteomics study

We investigated the ability to perform a clinical proteomic study using samples collected at different times from two independent clinical sites.

Label-free 2-D-LC-MS proteomic analysis was used to differentially quantify tens of thousands of peptides from human plasma. We have asked whether samples collected from two sites, when analyzed by this type of peptide profiling, reproducibly contain detectable peptide markers that are differentially expressed in the plasma of disease (advanced renal cancer) patients relative to healthy normals.

We have demonstrated that plasma proteins enriched in disease patients are indeed detected reproducibly in both clinical collections. Regression analysis, unsupervised hierarchical clustering and PCA detected no systematic bias in the data related to site of sample collection and processing. Using a genetic algorithm, support vector machine classification method, we were able to correctly classify disease samples at 88% sensitivity and 94% specificity using the second site as an independent validation set.

We conclude that multiple site collection, when analyzed by label-free 2-D-LC-MS, generates data that are sufficiently reproducible to guide reliable biomarker discovery.