In diagnostic cancer pathology, the identification of specific proteins or combinations of proteins by immunohistochemistry is often essential to arrive at a correct diagnosis and to guide patient management. The goal of ProCan is to investigate the application of high-throughput tissue protein profiling to this process by a combination of Pressure Cycling Technology (PCT) and Sequential Window Acquisition of all Theoretical Spectra (SWATH) mass spectrometry (MS). PCT SWATH-MS has demonstrated applicability to very small tissue samples with results potentially available in a clinically applicable turn-around-time (1).
One of the major goals of ProCan is to quantify proteins in tumour samples obtained from a variety of organs. Current evidence indicates that tissue proteomes obtained from PCT- SWATH are clustered based on their site of origin. Developing a SWATH based profile of different normal tissues will provide an important reference to guide interpretation of cancer proteomic data. Specifically, it will assist in understanding aspects of tumour differentiation, and tissue of origin in the case of metastatic disease.
In preliminary work, we have applied PCT SWATH-MS to create a complete proteomic profile (specifically an ion library essential for SWATH analysis) of samples collected from six different rat organs, (brain, liver, muscle, spleen, lung and kidney). The detailed results will be presented and will be uploaded to a publically available database such as SWATHAtlas, making the data available to all researchers.