Serologic Assay of Liver Fibrosis

OVERVIEW

Georgetown University researchers designed a method through which liver-secreted glycoprotein biomarker candidates for liver diseases and cancer, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), may be identified. This method involves a combination of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based glycoproteomic profiling of patient sera and informatics approaches to achieve non-invasive serologic monitoring of liver disease.

BACKGROUND

The initiation and development of liver diseases and cancer is characterized by changes in the glycosylation of liver-secreted proteins. Serological quantification and monitoring of glycoprotein biomarkers and disease-specific glycoforms in patient sera holds promise as a minimally invasive method for assessing the presence and advancement of liver disease.

Benefit

• Informatics approaches for identifying disease-specific liver-secreted glycoprotein biomarker candidates.
• Minimally invasive method to evaluate the presence and advancement of liver disease.
• Analytical infrastructure and workflow for variant glycoprotein identification.
• Software tools for glycopeptide LC-MS dataset interpretation and analysis of relative site specific protein glycoform abundance.

Market Application

• Diagnostic tool for the early detection and monitoring of liver disease and cancer.

Publications

• Increased sialylation of site-specific O-glycoforms of hemopexin in liver disease (DOI: 10.1186/s12014-016-9125-x) (link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034550/)
• Analysis of site and structure-specific core fucosylation in liver cirrhosis using exoglycosidase‐assisted data‐independent LC‐MS/MS (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02838-3) (link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02838-3)
• Optimized Fragmentation for Quantitative Analysis of Fucosylated N‐Glycoproteins by LC-MS-MRM (DOI: 10.1021/acs.anarchism.9b01983) (link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.9b01983