Anti-thrombin as a prognostic biomarker candidate for patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiform under treatment with perillyl alcohol
Juliana de Saldanha da Gama Fischer, Paulo Costa Carvalho, Ana Gisele da Costa Neves-Ferreira,Clovis Orlando da Fonseca, Jonas Perales, Maria da Gloria da Costa Carvalho and Gilberto Barbosa Domont
Perillyl alcohol (POH) is a naturally occurring monoterpene with antiangiogenic and anti-tumoral properties. This chemotherapeutic agent has proven effectiveness in several clinical trials, including an ongoing phase I, comprising patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiform (GBM) under treatment with POH by intranasal administration. Proteomics offers tools to distinguish states of biological systems according to protein expression differences and therefore, can be used to gain pathological insights and to search for disease follow-up biomarkers. In this work, a differential gel electrophoresis (DIGE) proteomic approach was used to search for plasma proteins that correlated with the disease progression in 10 of these patients. Our results pointed antithrombin (down) and fibrinogen (up) regulated after a four months treatment deserving to be further verified as prognostic markers for this treatment. Possible links between tumor progression and anti-thrombin expression level are also discussed.
Keywords: Glioblastoma multiform, perillyl alcohol, cancer, DIGE, proteomics, biomarker