A Proteomic Study on the Personalized Protein Corona of Liposomes. Relevance for Early Diagnosis of Pancreatic DUCTAL Adenocarcinoma and Biomarker Detection.

first_pagesettingsOrder Article Reprints Open AccessArticle A Proteomic Study on the Personalized Protein Corona of Liposomes. Relevance for Early Diagnosis of Pancreatic DUCTAL Adenocarcinoma and Biomarker Detection by Luca Digiacomo 1ORCID,Francesca Giulimondi 1ORCID,Daniela Pozzi 1,Alessandro Coppola 2ORCID,Vincenzo La Vaccara 2ORCID,Damiano Caputo 2ORCID andGiulio Caracciolo 1,*ORCID 1 Nanodelivery Lab, Department of Molecular Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, 00161 Rome, Italy 2 General Surgery Unit, University Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, 00128 Rome, Italy * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. J. Nanotheranostics 2021, 2(2), 82-93; https://doi.org/10.3390/jnt2020006 Submission received: 13 May 2021 / Revised: 4 June 2021 / Accepted: 4 June 2021 / Published: 11 June 2021 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Exclusive Papers of the Editorial Board Members) Downloadkeyboard_arrow_down Browse Figures Versions Notes Abstract Due to late diagnosis, high incidence of metastasis, and poor survival rate, pancreatic cancer is one of the most leading cause of cancer-related death. Although manifold recent efforts have been done to achieve an early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, CA-19.9 is currently the unique biomarker that is adopted for the detection, despite its limits in terms of sensitivity and specificity. To identify potential protein biomarkers for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), we used three model liposomes as nanoplatforms that accumulate proteins from human plasma and studied the composition of this biomolecular layer, which is known as protein corona. Indeed, plasma proteins adsorb on nanoparticle surface according to their abundance and affinity to the employed nanomaterial, thus even small differences between healthy and PDAC protein expression levels can be, in principle, detected. By mass spectrometry experiments, we quantified such differences and identified possible biomarkers for PDAC. Some of them are already known to exhibit different expressions in PDAC proteomes, whereas the role of other relevant proteins is still not clear. Therefore, we predict that the employment of nanomaterials and their protein corona may represent a useful tool to amplify the detection sensitivity of cancer biomarkers, which may be used for the early diagnosis of PDAC, with clinical implication for the subsequent therapy in the context of personalized medicine.