Proteomics discovery of radioresistant cancer biomarkers for radiotherapy

Radiotherapy (RT) is one of the most important strategies in cancer treatment. Radioresistance is a major challenge to RT and results in locoregional recurrence and metastasis. Thus, there is a great interest in investigating biomarkers to distinguish radiosensitive from radioresistant (RR) cancer patients. The development of proteomic techniques has sparked new searches for novel proteins for cancer biomarker discovery. Modern proteomic techniques allow for a high-throughput analysis of samples with the visualization and quantification of thousands of potential protein and peptide markers. The discovery of RR biomarkers can provide a clue for predicting RT response and discover therapeutic targets for developing personalised medicine of individual patients. In the past decade, emerging advanced proteomic technologies have been performed to identify radiation-related biomarkers in human cancers. This review discusses the mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomic techniques in RR cancer biomarker discovery, summarises RR biomarkers identified in cancers from proteomics-based findings and explores potential values of RR biomarkers for future clinical trials.