SELDI-TOF serum proteomics and breast cancer: which perspective?

Abstract

Despite the efforts of recent years, clinicians still lack reliable biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of clinical outcomes in breast cancer patients. Owing to the large number of people potentially involved in the management of this clinical problem, the search for noninvasive and repeatable laboratory assays has been intensive. Recently, the proteomic profiling performed by SELDI-TOF mass spectrometry, has been proposed in order to identify new clusters of serum markers that could be potentially useful in breast cancer management. The purpose of this special report is to review the literature on SELDI-TOF technology applied on serum coming from healthy people and breast cancer patients, in order to verify the clinical applicability of such approach. We conclude that potential new biomarkers, first of all for early diagnosis of breast cancer, need to be validated in larger clinical series.

Keywords::

• biomarker
• breast cancer
• diagnosis
• early detection
• LMW
• profiling
• prognosis
• protein chip
• proteomics
• SELDI-TOF
• serum

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have been partially funded by the Ministry of Health/Alliance Against Cancer, Italy–USA programme. The authors have no other 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 apart from those disclosed.

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