title: Oral brush biopsy analysis by matrix assisted laser desorption/ionisation-time of flight mass spectrometry profiling--a pilot study.
abstract: Oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCCs) often present as advanced tumours requiring aggressive local and regional therapy and result in significant functional impairment. The objective is to develop pre-symptomatic screening detection of OSCC by a brush biopsy method which is less invasive than the conventional biopsy for histology. Given the molecular heterogeneity of oral cancer, it is unlikely that even a panel of tumour markers would provide accurate diagnosis. Therefore, approaches such as the matrix-assisted-laser-desorption/ionisation-time-of-flight-mass-spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) allow several biomarkers or peptide profile patterns to be simultaneously assessed. Brush biopsies from 27 patients with histology-proven OSCCs plus 40 biopsies from 10 healthy controls were collected. MALDI-TOF-MS profiling was performed and additional statistical analysis of the data was used to classify the disease status according to the biological behaviour of the lesion. For classification a support vector machine algorithm was trained using spectra of brush biopsy samples to distinguish healthy control patients from patients with histology-proven OSCC. MALDI-TOF-MS was able to distinguish between healthy patients and OSCC patients with a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 93%. In summary, MALDI-TOF-MS in combination with sophisticated bioinformatic methods can distinguish OSCC patients from non-cancer controls with excellent sensitivity and specificity. Further improvement and validation of this approach is necessary to determine its feasibility to assist the pre-symptomatic detection of head and neck cancer screening in routine daily practice.
authors.affiliation: Department of Oral & Maxillofacial and Facial Plastic Surgery, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. torsten.remmerbach@medizin.uni-leipzig.de
authors.forename: Torsten W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Remmerbach
authors.forename: Katja
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Maurer
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Janke
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Schellenberger
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Eschrich
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bertolini
authors.forename: Herbert
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hofmann
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rupf
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000465:Algorithms; D001706:Biopsy / Q000379:methods; D002294:Carcinoma, Squamous Cell / Q000473:pathology*; D055088:Early Detection of Cancer / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods; D006258:Head and Neck Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening; D008875:Middle Aged; D010865:Pilot Projects; D040901:Proteomics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D019032:Spectrometry, Mass, Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*