Quantitative proteomic profiling of primary cancer-associated fibroblasts in oesophageal adenocarcinoma: CAF proteomic profiling in OAC

Background: Cancer–associated fibroblasts (CAFs) form the major stromal component of the tumour microenvironment (TME). The present study aimed to examine the proteomic profiles of CAFs vs. normal fibroblasts (NOFs) from patients with oesophageal adenocarcinoma to gain insight into their pro-oncogenic phenotype. Methods: CAFs/NOFs from four patients were sub-cultured and analysed usingquantitative proteomics. Differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) were subjected to bioinformatics and compared with published proteomics and transcriptomics datasets. Results: Principal component analysis of all profiled proteins showed that CAFs had high heterogeneity and clustered separately from NOFs. Bioinformatics interrogation of the DEPs demonstrated inhibition of Adhesion of Epithelial Cells, Adhesion of connective tissue cells and Cell death of Fibroblast Cell Lines in CAFs vs. NOFs (p Conclusions: The identified pathways and participating proteins may provide novel insight on the tumour-promoting properties of CAFs and unravel novel adjuvant therapeutic targets in the TME.