Clinical OMICs - Issue 8 - (Page 6)

Clinical OMICs NEWS he reductionist approach to cancer detection-scrutinizing a particular set of biomarkers for each cancer-is fraught with obstacles. It may not be possible, in many instances, to rely on just a few biomarkers, given the complexity of the body's response to disease. Worse, many biomarkers are elusive, so rare as to be all but undetectable, particularly after dilution in the bloodstream. Finally, in a typical reductionist scheme, the biomarkers that diagnosticians would have to follow would change from cancer to cancer, likely necessitating multiple detection platforms-hardly a convenience. Is there a better way? Yes, say researchers at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute. These researchers, led by Phillip Stafford, advocate an approach they call immunosignaturing. It could, they say, enable early detection-always crucial in cancer treatment-and deliver universality. That is, a single platform could be used for any cancer. Immunosignaturing relies on a multiplexed system that profiles, in snapshot fashion, the entire population of antibodies circulating in blood. This approach can leverage the response of antibodies to disease-related changes, as well as the inherent signal amplification associated with antigen-simulated B-cell proliferation. In an article entitled, "Immunosignature system for diagnosis of cancer," the researchers describe how their system can meet at least one of their self-imposed requirements- universality. This article, which Stephen Albert Johnston is director of Biodesign's Center for Innovations in Medicine. Researchers believe that immunosignaturing can leverage the response of antibodies to disease-related changes. appeared July 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, promises that the other self-imposed requirement-early detection-will be addressed "separately." "To perform an immunosignature assay, the antibodies in diluted blood are incubated with a microarray of thousands of random sequence peptides," write the authors. "The pattern of binding to these peptides is the immunosignature. Because the peptide sequences are completely random, the assay is effectively disease-agnostic, potentially providing a comprehensive diagnostic on multiple diseases simultaneously." When the authors refer to random sequences of peptides, they refer only to the amino acid sequences of individual peptides, not the placement of a peptide of a given sequence at a particular location in the array. That is, from one chip to the next, the pep(continued on p. 30) 6 Clinical OMICs August 13, 2014 www.clinicalomics.com Image © Arizona State University Early Warning of Any Cancer T http://www.clinicalomics.com

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Clinical OMICs - Issue 8