Proteomic Patterns of Preinvasive Bronchial Lesions

Purpose: A proteomics approach is warranted to further elucidate the molecular steps involved in lung tumor development. We asked whether we could classify preinvasive lesions of airway epithelium according to their proteomic profile.Experimental Design: We obtained matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry profiles from 10-μm sections of fresh-frozen tissue samples: 25 normal lung, 29 normal bronchial epithelium, and 20 preinvasive and 36 invasive lung tumor tissue samples from 53 patients. Proteomic profiles were calibrated, binned, and normalized before analysis. We performed class comparison, class prediction, and supervised hierarchic cluster analysis. We tested a set of discriminatory features obtained in a previously published dataset to classify this independent set of normal, preinvasive, and invasive lung tissues.Results: We found a specific proteomic profile that allows an overall predictive accuracy of over 90% of normal, preinvasive, and invasive lung tissue...