Plasma gelsolin protein: a candidate biomarker for hepatitis B-associated liver cirrhosis identified by proteomic approach.

Background: Despite the significant improvement in internal medicine and supportive therapy in recent years, liver fibrosis/cirrhosis remains a serious health issue in hepatitis B virus (HBV) infected patients. Invasive liver biopsy is presently the best means of diagnosing cirrhosis, but it carries a significant risk and has well recognised limitations such as sampling error, hence the importance in developing early diagnosis biomarkers. With this aim, we performed a pilot proteomic study to assess this as a strategy for plasma marker detection in patients suffering from HBV-associated liver cirrhosis.

Methods: Plasma from eight chronic HBV-infection patients and from eight HBV-related cirrhotic patients were selected and proteome profiles were created by two-dimensional electrophoresis. The strategy included the use of ProteoMiner enrichment kit for the reduction of highly abundance proteins (e.g. albumin and IgG) prior to proteomic analyses with the goal to improve detection of novel candidate markers.

Results: One reproducible spot was found to be completely repressed in plasma samples from cirrhotic patients and mass spectrometry analysis identified this a specific variant of the gelsolin actin-depolymerizing factor. Though further investigations are needed, especially in term of clinical validation, to our knowledge this is the first time that gelsolin is proposed as potential biomarker in HBV-related liver pathologies.

Conclusions: Our findings confirm the potential utility of gelsolin either as a prognostic marker or a replacement therapeutic agent to alleviate liver injury.