Abstract 3880: Quantitative human secretome: a technology to measure the expression levels of thousand of secreted proteins

The secretome constitutes an increasingly important category of proteins which are involved in a multitude of biological, physiological and pathological processes, and are thus a clinically relevant source for biomarkers and therapeutic targets. The development of cancer often leads to alterations in growth-stimulatory autocrine and paracrine signals which change the expression levels of secreted proteins such as growth factors, cytokines, chemokines, and angiogenic factors. There is thus an urgent need to develop high-content and high-throughput approaches to profile the secretome. Using a sandwich-based ELISA format, we have developed an antibody array technology which can quantitatively measure expression levels of 1000 secreted proteins. Most of the target proteins are detectable at pg/ml levels. We have also developed a multi-layered normalization process (including positive controls, standard curves, and reference samples) which significantly enhances the performance of the platform and may be used for accurate measurement of protein concentrations in a variety of samples, including serum, plasma, tissue lysates, and other fluids. This platform is also high throughput, allowing hundreds of samples to be assayed daily. We have analyzed several hundred serum samples (both normal and cancer patients) using this system. Our results demonstrate that our technologies provide a powerful approach for delineating candidate biomarkers with potential clinical significance and may be broadly applicable to cancer and other human diseases. Citation Format: Ruo-Pan Huang, Yingqing Mao, RuoChun Huang, Haw-Han Yen. Quantitative human secretome: a technology to measure the expression levels of thousand of secreted proteins. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 3880.