Alpha-1-microglobulin/bikunin (AMBP) protein corona (PPC) as biomarker for early diagnosis in non-small-cell lung carcinomas (NSCLC) patients: A case report

Abstract Nanoparticles are increasingly used in biomedical applications such as imaging, drug delivery and hyperthermic therapies. The surface of this nanoparticles once incubated with biological medium is covered by proteins constituting a shell named “protein corona”. Thus, understanding the interaction of nanomaterials with biological fluids becomes basic for their application. Recently it has been shown that the protein corona composition is critically affected by biological sample originates from the specific disease. This innovative concept takes the name of “personalized protein corona (PPC)”, which represents a promising strategy for personalized medicine. PPC acts a ‘nano-accumulator’ of proteins with affinity for the particle surface. Thus, this approach allows detecting protein alterations as those produced by clinical manifestations of disease even when they are too small to be detected by rutinary blood tests. Non-small-cell lung carcinomas (NSCLC) is the most common type of lung cancer and it has poor prognosis, because overall survival after 5 years is 20–25% for all stages. Thus, innovative methods for early detection and proper characterization of NSCLC are an urgent task. To this end, we incubated liposomes nanoparticles with plasma from humans with histologically proven NSCLC. In this study we report an NSLC case. We have analyzed the serum before and after incubation with liposome by a HPLC ion trap mass spectrometer. Proteins were identified by fragments characterization of MS/MS spectra through MASCOT search engine using Swiss-Prot database. We have found the protein Alpha-1-microglobulin/bikunin (AMBP) enriches the PPC from NSCLC patients thus being a potential biomarker, in fact this protein has already been proven to be a potential biomarker of prostate and pancreas cancer. We have identified AMBP both in protein corona and serum. These results suggest that the use of nano particles could be a test able to provide early cancer detection.