RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Targeted Proteomics and Support Vector Classification Reveal Potential Biomarkers for the Early Detection of High-grade Serous Ovarian Cancer JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2022.03.31.486596 DO 10.1101/2022.03.31.486596 A1 Tyler T. Cooper A1 Dylan Z. Dieters-Castator A1 Jiahui Liu A1 Gabrielle M. Siegers A1 Desmond Pink A1 John D. Lewis A1 Yangxin Fu A1 Helen Steed A1 Gilles A. Lajoie A1 Lynne-Marie Postovit YR 2022 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/01/2022.03.31.486596.abstract AB The 5-year prognosis of late-stage epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) remains poor, thus the discovery of early-stage EOC biomarkers is of paramount importance. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) circulating in blood are thought to contain proteomic cargo originating from an EOC microenvironment and are thus amenable for clinical biomarker discovery. We profiled the proteome of EVs purified from patient blood plasma, ascites and cell lines using strong cation exchange peptide fractionation and Orbitrap-based tandem mass spectrometry. To further increase sensitivity and specificity of the method, CD9-affinity purification and ultracentrifugation were used to purify EVs. Using parallel reaction monitoring we identified a compendum of 240 proteins that were differentially enrirched in EVs derived from EOC (n=10) patients versus women with non-cancerous gynecological conditions (n=9). Support vector machines were optimized using leave-one-out cross-validation and this methodology was implemented on a test set of malignant (n=4) and control (n=3) donors. Using the relative levels of >450 EV-associated peptides in a cohort of plasma-derived EVs, we identified several combinatorial peptides capable of discriminating high-grade serous EOC with up to 100% accuracy in Stage I, II, and III donors. This study demonstrates an adaptable biomarker discovery pipeline and provides pinoeering evidence of EV-associated biomarkers for the detection of early-stage EOC.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.