Serum proteomic profile analysis for endometrial carcinoma detection with MALDI-TOF MS

INTRODUCTION: Endometrial carcinoma is the one of the leading causes of terminal cancer death in women, and the best way to solve it is through an early diagnosis. Serum proteomic profiling is a promising approach to classify disease versus normal and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF). This analysis is a new potential tool for the diagnosis of human diseases. The objective of our study was to assess the feasibility of mass spectrometry, based on serum proteomic pattern for the discrimination of endometrial carcinoma patients from healthy control patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS: By using 30 pre-operative endometrial carcinoma serum samples and 30 healthy controls, we generated MALDI-TOF protein profiles, established the serum detection model, and analyzed the data. Furthermore, we validated the data and got the total sensitivity (97.6%) and specificity (100%), which could classify all the samples well and demonstrated the high, significant separation ability. RESULTS: Our results indicated that high sensitivity and specificity classify endometrial carcinoma by the serum detection model and showed the potential usefulness of serum protein profiles. CONCLUSIONS: From these results, we could tell that MALDI-TOF MS is a potential tool for diagnosing diseases by the use of serum samples and will be widely used in the future for clinical work.