Biomarker for Personalized Medicine

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Cancer is a diverse disease and the cancer patients with identical clinical staging and pathological grading show the different response to the therapy. Optimized treatments for individual patients are more important in the situation that we have many options for treatments against cancer. With this notion, the diagnostic modalities and biomarkers are intensively developed for personalized medicine.

Cancer proteomics using clinical samples and information has been conducted in the project to develop the diagnostic modalities for personalized medicine. Global association study linking the clinico-patholgical parameters and proteomic aberrations will identify the biomarker candidates, because proteome directly governs the malignant phenotypes of tumors and response to the treatments in cancer patients.Effective collaboration between basic researchers, clinicians, pathologists and industrial staffs is unique to the Proteome Bioinformatics Project. Proteomic modalities based on two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) has been fully developed in the project, and applied to the proteomic study on lung cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, malignant soft-tissue sarcomas and malignant pleural mesothelioma. Our proteomic study using more than 1,000 tumor tissues and plasma samples resulted in the identification of proteins, the expression of which was substantially correlated with onset and progression of cancer, histological malignancies and differentiation, response to chemotherapy, and metastasis/recurrence/survival period of cancer patients. Novel diagnostic modalities using the identified proteins as biomarkers are now under development to achieve the personalized medicine.