Are Gastric Cancer Resection Margin Proteomic Profiles More Similar to Those from Controls or Tumors?

A strategy for treating cancer is to surgically remove the tumor together with a portion of apparently healthy tissue surrounding it, the so-called “resection margin”, to minimize recurrence. Here, we investigate whether the proteomic profiles from biopsies of gastric cancer resection margins are indeed more similar to those from healthy tissue than from cancer biopsies. To this end, we analyzed biopsies using an offline MudPIT shotgun proteomic approach and performed label-free quantitation through a distributed normalized spectral abundance factor approach adapted for extracted ion chromatograms (XICs). A multidimensional scaling analysis revealed that each of those tissue-types is very distinct from each other. The resection margin presented several proteins previously correlated with cancer, but also other overexpressed proteins that may be related to tumor nourishment and metastasis, such as collagen alpha-1, ceruloplasmin, calpastatin, and E-cadherin. We argue that the resection margin plays a key role in Paget’s “soil to seed” hypothesis, that is, that cancer cells require a special microenvironment to nourish and that understanding it could ultimately lead to more effective treatments.