Exhaled Biomarkers for Point-of-Care Diagnosis: Recent Advances and New Challenges in Breathomics.

Cancers, chronic diseases and respiratory infections are major causes of mortality and present diagnostic and therapeutic challenges for health care. There is an unmet medical need for non-invasive, easy-to-use biomarkers for the early diagnosis, phenotyping, predicting and monitoring of the therapeutic responses of these disorders. Exhaled breath sampling is an attractive choice that has gained attention in recent years.

In-depth proteomic analysis reveals unique subtype-specific signatures in human small-cell lung cancer.

Background: Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) molecular subtypes have been primarily characterized based on the expression pattern of the following key transcription regulators: ASCL1 (SCLC-A), NEUROD1 (SCLC-N), POU2F3 (SCLC-P) and YAP1 (SCLC-Y). Here, we investigated the proteomic landscape of these molecular subsets with the aim to identify novel subtype-specific proteins of diagnostic and therapeutic relevance.

Methods: Pellets and cell media of 26 human SCLC cell lines were subjected to label-free shotgun proteomics for large-scale protein identification and quantitation, followed by in-depth bioinformatic analyses.