Protein biomarkers The human genome project catalyzed tremendous advances in molecular measurement technologies. Despite these advances, it is unfortunately the case that diagnosis of human ailments such as ovarian cancer and Parkinson’s disease is often based on overt clinical symptoms, at which point the success of disease-modifying therapies is unacceptably low. The entire landscape of clinical care from prevention, to early detection, to therapeutic intervention will benefit from discovery of new disease-specific biomarkers. Identification of new biomarkers is complicated by multiple factors including, (i) tissue, cellular, and molecular heterogeneity; (ii) massive dilution of early disease markers in the proteins, metabolites, and other by-products of normal physiology; (iii) practical limitations in the quality or quantity of diagnostic specimens; and (iv) the confounding influence of natural biological variation across populations. We leverage our technology development program in high performance peptide fractionation to address these and other hurdles in the biomarker discovery pipeline. Ultimately data from these studies may reveal specific or multi-variate protein-level signatures which are clinically-actionable as suitable for use as markers of early detection, patient stratification and prognosis, or as a guide for personalized therapeutics. See papers below and our resources page for more information.
Publications related to our biomarker research 7. Han C, Bellone S, Siegel ER, Altwerger G, Menderes G, Bonazzoli E, Takata T, Pettinella F, Bianchi A, Riccio F, Zammataro L, Yadav G, Marto JA, Penet MF, Levine DA, Drapkin R, Patel A, Litkouhi B, Ratner E, Silasi DA, Huang GS, Azodi M, Schwartz PE, Santin AD. A novel biomarker panel for the early detection of high-grade serous carcinoma. Gynecologic Oncology 2018;149:585-91.
6. Brown FC, Still E, Koche RP, Yim CY, Takao S, Cifani P, Reed C, Gunasekera S, Ficarro SB, Romanienko P, Mark W, McCarthy C, de Stanchina E, Gonen M, Seshan V, Bhola P, O’Donnel C, Spitzer B, Stutzke C, Lavallee VP, Hebert J, Krivtsov AV, Melnick A, Paietta EM, Tallman MS, Letai A, Sauvageau G, Pouliot G, Levine R, Marto JA, Armstrong S, Kentsis A. Mef2c phosphorylation is required for chemotherapy resistance in acute myeloid leukemia. Cancer Discovery 2018;8:478-97.
5. Chen-Plotkin AS, Kopil C, Albin R, Alcalay R, Babcock D, Bajaj V, Bowman D, Buko A, Cedarbaum J, Chelksy D, Cookson M, Dawson T, Dewey R, Foroud T, Frasier M, German D, Gwinn K, Huang X, Kremer T, Lasch S, Marek K, Marto JA, Merchant K, Mollenhauer B, Naito A, Potashkin J, Reimer A, Rosenthal L, Saunders-Pullman R, Scherzer CR, Sherer T, Singleton A, Sutherland M, Thiele I, VanderBrug M, Keuren-Jensen KV, Vaillancourt D, Walt D, West A, Zhang J. Finding useful biomarkers for parkinson’s disease. Sci Trans Med 2018; 10;eaam6003.
4. Norberg E, Lako A, Stanley IA, Chen PH, Zhou F, Ficarro SB, Chapuy B, Chen L, Rodig S, Shipp MA, Marto JA, Danial NN. Differential contribution of the mitochondrial translation pathway to the survival of diffuse large b-cell lymphoma subsets. Cell Death Diff 2017;24:251-62.
3. Zhu D, Wang Z, Zhao JJ, Calimeri T, Meng J, Hideshima T, Fulcinitti M, Kang Y, Ficarro SB, Tai YT, Hunter Z, McMilin D, Tong H, Mitsiades C, Wu C, Treon S, Dorfman D, Pinkus G, Munshi N, Tassone P, Marto JA, Anderson K, Carrasco R. The cyclophilin a-cd147 complex promotes bone marrow colonization of b-cell malignancies: implications for therapy. Nat Medicine 2015;21:572-80.
2. Labidi-Galy SI, Clauss A, Ng V, Duraisamy S, Selfors L, Elias KM, Bilal E, Davidowitz R, Lu Y, Badalian-Very G, Piao HY, Kang UB, Ficarro SB, Ganesan S, Mills G, Marto JA, Gyorffy B, Drapkin R. Elafin drives poor outcome in high grade serous ovarian cancers and basal-like breast tumors. Oncogene 2015;34:373-83.
1. Caro P, Kishan AU, Norberg E, Stanley I, Chapuy B, Ficarro SB, Zhou F, Polak K, Tondera D, Gounarides J, Yin H, Green MR, Chen L, Monti S, Marto JA, Shipp MA, Danial NN. Metabolic signatures uncover novel targets in molecular subsets of diffuse large b cell lymphoma. Cancer Cell 2012;22:547-60§.