Serum Protein Pattern Could Predict the Therapeutic Effect of First-Line Pemetrexed/Cisplatin Chemotherapy in Patients With Lung Adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: In patients with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a pemetrexed/cisplatin (PP) regimen is considered as one of the preferred first-line treatments. However, only about half of the treated patients respond, and there is no clinically useful marker that can predict the response to the regimen. METHODS: We established a potential pattern for the prediction of efficacy of first-line PP chemotherapy in patients with lung adenocarcinoma, by using artificial neural networks (ANNs) analysis of surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS) in this preliminary study. RESULTS: The samples were randomly divided into training set and test set. From the test set, through cross-validation, the established protein pattern for PP separated the responders from the non-responders with a sensitivity of 95.8% and a specificity of 90.0%. CONCLUSION: It could be helpful for oncologists to select patients who could benefit from PP chemotherapy.