Proteomics of osteosarcoma

Abstract

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary malignant tumor of bone and the third most common cancer in childhood and adolescence. Nowadays, early diagnosis, drug resistance and recurrence of the disease represent the major challenges in OS treatment. Post-genomics, and in particular proteomic technologies, offer an invaluable opportunity to address the level of biological complexity expressed by OS. Although the main goal of OS oncoproteomics is focused on diagnostic and prognostic biomarker discovery, in this review we describe and discuss global protein profiling approaches to other aspects of OS biology and pathophysiology, or to investigate the mechanism of action of chemotherapeutics. In addition, we present proteomic analyses carried out on OS cell lines as in vitro models for studying osteoblastic cell biology and the attractive opportunity offered by proteomics of OS cancer stem cells.

Keywords::

• cell model
• osteosarcoma
• osteosarcoma pathophysiology
• osteosarcoma therapy
• post-genomics
• proteomics

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Istituto Toscano Tumouri-ITT bando 2008.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common pediatric primary malignant tumor of bone tissue.

• The greatest challenges in OS treatment are the resistance to conventional chemotherapy and the development of pulmonary metastasis.

• The main application of OS proteomics is biomarker discovery.

• OS cell lines as osteoblast-like cell models have been extensively used to investigate bone biology.

• OS proteomics has been also applied to drug target deconvolution and to investigate drug mechanism of action.

• Subproteomics can notably improve the understanding of OS biology and pathophysiology as well as of drugs mechanism of action.

• Functional analysis of ‘-omics’ data is instrumental to the application of proteomic technologies to mechanistic studies.

• OS stem cells have fundamental implications in almost all the aspects of cancer biology, and application of high-throughput analysis, including proteomics, to CSCs will expand in the next few years.

Notes