VERIFICATION OF SALIVA PROTEINS CANDIDATES FOR OSCC MARKERS AND THEIR CORRELATION WITH PROGNOSIS

Abstract

The most common oral cancer in the world is squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), accounting for more than 90% of all cases of cancer in the oral cavity. Thus, the research on molecular markers associated with the development and progress of human diseases has been the subject of intense research. The successful biomarkers are applied to the routine practice, both in diagnosis and prognosis, as well as guiding therapeutic strategies for intervention. The findings that saliva has molecular profiles indicating systemic diseases urge the study of non-invasive diagnosis using saliva as source of potential diagnosis, prognosis and predictive based on proteomics. In the discovery-based proteomics studies that have been developing by our research group showed (1) the differential abundance of 137 secreted proteins, in OSCC cell lines compared with a non-cancer cell line, and (2) differential abundance of 44 proteins in saliva of patients with OSCC compared with patients that who had the tumor removed. Based on these large-scale data, in a subsequent study of targeted based proteomics, we verified the abundance of 10 proteins in the saliva of patients with OSCC. However, although these studies indicate potential candidates for markers, their correlation with the prognosis cannot be performed due to the heterogeneous distribution of the patients between the different stages. In this way, the purpose of this project is to evaluate 68 markers originated from these studies of our group to define a panel of proteins that can be used as potential markers of prognosis. Therefore, to gather expert knowledge on carrying out quantitative proteomics experiments in cutting-edge technology, we propose a collaboration project in the verification phase to validate 39 proteotypic peptides, which are part of the panel for candidate biomarkers in saliva.