Identification of novel serum biomarkers for gastric cancer by magnetic bead.

Early diagnosis and early treatment is known to improve prognosis for gastric cancer. Magnetic affinity beads can be used to extract peptides from un-fractionated serum samples. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) can detect the presence and the molecular mass of peptides. MALDI-TOF-MS mass spectra of peptides and proteins were generated after WCX CLINPROT bead fractionation of 62 gastric cancer serum samples. The discovery set consisted of 44 samples while the validation set was 18 serum samples. The spectra were analyzed statistically using flexAnalysisTM and Clin-ProtTM bioinformatic software. The six most significant peaks were selected out by ClinProTool software and utilized to train a Supervised Neural Network to identify gastric cancer sera from control sera. The sensitivity and specificity of the model when tested on the validation set were 100% and 75%, respectively. A set of 6 peptides that can be used to distinguish serum from gastric cancer patients with good sensitivity and specificity were identified, and these peptides may be useful biomarkers to distinguish cancer individuals who may benefit from radiologic or endoscopic examination.