Discovery of biomarker candidates associated with the risk of short- and long-term relapse after infliximab withdrawal in Crohn’s patients: a proteomics-based study

Objective: A subset of Crohn’s disease (CD) patients experiences long-term remission after infliximab withdrawal. Biomarkers are needed to identify those patients.
Design: New biomarkers of relapse were searched in the baseline serum of CD patients stopping infliximab when they were under combined therapy (antimetabolite and infliximab) and stable clinical remission (STORI cohort, n=102). From shotgun proteomics experiment (discovery step), biomarker candidates were identified and further targeted by selected reaction monitoring (verification step). The dataset was stratified to search for markers of short- (<6 months) or long-term relapse (>6 months). The risk of relapse and the predicting capacity associated with biomarker candidates were evaluated using univariate Cox model and log-rank statistic, respectively. To test their complementary predicting capacity, biomarker candidates were systematically combined in pairs.
Results: Distinct biomarker candidates were associated with the risk (hazard ratio: HR) of short- (15 proteins, 2.9