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Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Quantitative Mass Spectrometric Profiling of Cancer-cell Proteomes Derived From Liquid and Solid Tumors
Published on: February 27, 2015
Pan-cancer proteomic map of 949 human cell lines
Emanuel Gonçalves1, Rebecca C Poulos2, Zhaoxiang Cai2
1Wellcome Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK; Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal; INESC-ID, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal.
Abstract:
The proteome provides unique insights into disease biology beyond the genome and transcriptome. A lack of large proteomic datasets has restricted the identification of new cancer biomarkers. Here, proteomes of 949 cancer cell lines across 28 tissue types are analyzed by mass spectrometry. Deploying a workflow to quantify 8,498 proteins, these data capture evidence of cell-type and post-transcriptional modifications. Integrating multi-omics, drug response, and CRISPR-Cas9 gene essentiality screens with a deep learning-based pipeline reveals thousands of protein biomarkers of cancer vulnerabilities that are not significant at the transcript level. The power of the proteome to predict drug response is very similar to that of the transcriptome. Further, random downsampling to only 1,500 proteins has limited impact on predictive power, consistent with protein networks being highly connected and co-regulated. This pan-cancer proteomic map (ProCan-DepMapSanger) is a comprehensive resource available at https://cellmodelpassports.sanger.ac.uk.

