Diagnostic Markers
Mass spectrometry reveals new diagnostic markers to characterise thyroid cancers
Leveraging the highly discriminative utility of targeted mass spectrometry by selected reaction monitoring, APAF Director Mark Molloy and PhD student Juan Martinez-Aguliar developed assays to quantitate the S100 protein isoform family (Martinez-Aguilar and Molloy, J. Proteome Res, 2013). This breakthrough led to a new collaboration with Prof Rory Clifton-Bligh, an endocrinologist at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In a recent publication (Martinez-Aguilar et al., BMC Cancer, 2015) we describe our use of the S100 assays to identify isoform specific expression of S100 proteins in thyroid histotypes. This study showed that follicular thyroid and papillary thyroid tumours have different expression of several S100 proteins compared with normal thyroid and benign adenomas. These findings help understand the molecular pathology underlying these diseases and shows the potential for using these markers for discriminate analysis. In particular, several proteins were detected that could help resolve the difficultly in histological diagnosis of follicular adenoma as distinct from follicular neoplasia.
Relevant Publications
MartÃnez-Aguilar J, Clifton-Bligh R, Molloy MP. A multiplexed, targeted mass spectrometry assay of the S100 protein family uncovers the isoform-specific expression in thyroid tumours.
BMC Cancer. 2015 Mar 29;15:199. doi: 10.1186/s12885-015-1217-x
MartÃnez-Aguilar J, Molloy MP. Label-free selected reaction monitoring enables multiplexed quantitation of S100 protein isoforms in cancer cells.
J Proteome Res. 2013 Aug 2;12(8):3679-88. doi: 10.1021/pr400251t. Epub 2013 Jul 3.