The high incidence of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is well known in the Northeastern region of Thailand. The improvement of diagnosis, treatment and biomarker discovery for CCA are still needed and should greatly improve treatment outcome for patients. At present, the tumor markers for CCA are CA19-9 and CEA, which are not specific. Our previous studies on the search for CCA biomarkers since 2004 until present have found the list of possible candidates, together with our recent technique, the mass spectrometry-based label-free quantitative proteomics, was employed for 27 plasma samples (9 normal individuals, 9 CCA and 9 disease controls). Four proteins (Protein 1, 2, 3 and 4) were selected for immunoblot verification using ELISA immunoassay to examine the diagnostic performances in a larger cohort (63 normal, 26 CCA and 37 non-CCA). Receiver Operating Characteristics for protein 1 gave higher expression with the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.835 (80.8% sensitivity, 83.8% specificity) when compared to other 3 proteins. Among the used of indexed models, a combination of protein 1, protein 2 and protein 3 increased the diagnostic performance with the AUC of 0.849 (76.9% sensitivity, 89.2% specificity). Our result for the combination of 3 proteins showed good promise as a potential multiplexing biomarker for CCA, and the further validation should be explored in an independent cohort.
Supported by the Chulabhorn Research Institute