Protein biomarkers for Lung Cancer: a bioinformatic approach

Abstract

Lung cancer is one of the most occurring cancers around the world with increasing mortality rate and Bangladesh has a very high rate of lung cancer patient. Detection of lung cancer is not very easy process and quite undetectable until it reaches to the metastatic stage. Protein biomarkers are already being studied to diagnose disease type and stage along with the proper treatment planning for several types of cancer including breast, pancreatic and colon cancer. In this study, 14 proteins (MDK, MMP2, TFPI, TIMP-1, OPN, BIRC6, CEA, CDK4, HSPA5, HSP90α, EFGR, and ACTN4) were chosen that are expressed in lung cancer patient and analyzed using different bioinformatics tools (MEME, SWISS MODEL WORKPLACE). Since sequence motif can be used as a tool for predicting protein function for each of the protein, after assessing the homology modeling and sequence motifs of the 14 proteins, 3(OPN, EGFR, TIMP1) of them were identified for further analysis. The expression level of these lung cancer proteins were checked for better understanding. Additional wet-lab based study of such protein biomarkers maybe used as a panel for further researches that are designed to find out the regulatory properties, rationality and therapeutic agents, for diagnosis of the disease and the best suited treatment system for a lung cancer patient in future.