HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Web of Science (21) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Brouwers, F M Articles by Pacak, K Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Brouwers, F M Articles by Pacak, K

¹ Reproductive Biology and Medicine Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
² NCI/FDA Clinical Proteomics Program, Office of Cell and Gene Therapies, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Food and Drug Administration, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
³ Institute of Experimental Endocrinology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
⁴ Department of Urology, Komensky Faculty of Medicine, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
⁵ NCI/FDA Clinical Proteomics Program, Laboratory of Pathology, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
⁶ Department of Clinical Physiopathology, Endocrine Unit, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
⁷ Department of Radiological Sciences, St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
⁸ Clinical Neurocardiology Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
⁹ Urologic Oncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
¹⁰ Correlogic Systems Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
¹¹ National Cancer Institute Biomedical Proteomics Program, Analytical Chemistry Laboratory, Mass Spectrometry Center, SAIC-Frederick, Inc., NCI-Frederick, Frederick, Maryland, USA
¹² Predictive Diagnostics Inc., Vacaville, California, USA

(Requests for offprints should be addressed to K Pacak, Unit on Clinical Neuroendocrinology, RBMB, NIH, NICHD, Building 10, CRC, Room 1E-1-3140, 10 Center Drive, MSC-1109, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1109, USA; Email: karel{at}mail.nih.gov)

Metastatic lesions occur in up to 36% of patients with pheochromocytoma. Currently there is no way to reliably detect or predict which patients are at risk for metastatic pheochromocytoma. Thus, the discovery of biomarkers that could distinguish patients with benign disease from those with metastatic disease would be of great clinical value. Using surface-enhanced laser desorption ionization protein chips combined with high-resolution mass spectrometry, we tested the hypothesis that pheochromocytoma pathologic states can be reflected as biomarker information within the low molecular weight (LMW) region of the serum proteome. LMW protein profiles were generated from the serum of 67 pheochromocytoma patients from four institutions and analyzed by two different bioinformatics approaches employing pattern recognition algorithms to determine if the LMW component of the circulatory proteome contains potentially useful discriminatory information. Both approaches were able to identify combinations of LMW molecules which could distinguish all metastatic from all benign pheochromocytomas in a separate blinded validation set.

In conclusion, for this study set low molecular mass biomarker information correlated with pheochromocytoma pathologic state using blinded validation. If confirmed in larger validation studies, efforts to identify the underlying diagnostic molecules by sequencing would be warranted. In the future, measurement of these biomarkers could be potentially used to improve the ability to identify patients with metastatic disease.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. T. Adler, G. Y. Meyer-Rochow, H. Chen, D. E. Benn, B. G. Robinson, R. S. Sippel, and S. B. Sidhu Pheochromocytoma: Current Approaches and Future Directions Oncologist, July 1, 2008; 13(7): 779 - 793. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				W. Yuan, W. Wang, B. Cui, T. Su, Y. Ge, L. Jiang, W. Zhou, and G. Ning Overexpression of ERBB-2 was more frequently detected in malignant than benign pheochromocytomas by multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification and immunohistochemistry Endocr. Relat. Cancer, March 1, 2008; 15(1): 343 - 350. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				B. Ye, S. Skates, S. C. Mok, N. K. Horick, H. F. Rosenberg, A. Vitonis, D. Edwards, P. Sluss, W. K. Han, R. S. Berkowitz, et al. Proteomic-Based Discovery and Characterization of Glycosylated Eosinophil-Derived Neurotoxin and COOH-Terminal Osteopontin Fragments for Ovarian Cancer in Urine Clin. Cancer Res., January 15, 2006; 12(2): 432 - 441. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]