Proteomics analysis of human breast milk by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoressi (2D-PAGE) coupled with mass spectrometry to assess breast cancer risk

Breast Cancer (BC) is one of the most common cancers and one of the most common causes for cancer- related mortality. Discovery of protein biomarkers associated with cancer, is considered as important for early diagnosis and prediction of the cancer risk. Protein biomarkers could be investigated by large-scale protein investigation or proteomics, using mass spectrometry (MS)- based techniques. Our group applies MS-based proteomics to study the protein pattern in human breast milk from women with BC and controls and investigates the alterations and dysregula-tions of breast milk proteins in comparison pairs of BC versus control. These dysregulated pro-teins might be considered as potential future biomarkers of BC. Identification of potential bi-omarkers in breast milk may benefit young women without BC, but who could collect the milk for future assessment of BC risk. Previously we identified several dysregulated proteins in dif-ferent sets of human breast milk samples from BC patients and controls using gel-based protein separation coupled with MS. Here, we performed two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electro-phoresis (2D-PAGE) coupled with nano-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (nanoLC-MS/MS) in a small-scale study on a set of 6 human breast milk samples (3 BC samples vs. 3 controls) and we identified several dysregulated proteins which have potential roles in cancer progression and might be considered as potential BC biomarkers in the future.