Serum proteomic profiling for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer

No ideal serum biomarker currently exists for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (CRC). Magnetic bead-based fractionation coupled with MALDI-TOF MS was used to screen serum samples from CRC patients, healthy controls, and other cancer patients. A diagnostic model with five proteomic features (m/z 1778.97, 1866.16, 1934.65, 2022.46, and 4588.53) was generated using Fisher algorithm with best performance. The Fisher-based model could discriminate CRC patients from the controls with 100% (46/46) sensitivity and 100% (35/35) specificity in the training set, 95.6% (43/45) sensitivity and 83.3% (35/42) specificity in the test set. We further validated the model with 94.4% (254/269) sensitivity and 75.5% (83/110) specificity in the external independent group. In other cancers group, the Fisher-based model classified 25 of 46 samples (54.3%) as positive and the other 21 as negative. With FT-ICR-MS, the proteomic features of m/z 1778.97, 1866.16, 1934.65, and 2022.46, of which intensities decreased significantly in CRC, were identified as fragments of complement C3f. Therefore, the Fisher-based model containing five proteomic features was able to effectively differentiate CRC patients from healthy controls and other cancers with a high sensitivity and specificity, and may be CRC-specific. Serum complement C3f, which was significantly decreased in CRC group, may be relevant to the incidence of CRC.