Oesophageal adenocarcinoma is often diagnosed at late stages with related poor patient prognosis. Diagnosis of oesophageal adenocarcinoma currently requires expensive and invasive endoscopy-biopsy procedures that are often only performed when obvious symptoms have manifested (usually at an advanced stage). A targeted mass spectrometry-based assay was developed to analyse serum samples for oesophageal adenocarcinoma. The assay is based around a magnetic bead bound lectin that pulls down glycoproteins with specific sugar moieties before digestion and LCMS analysis. The method measures 33 target peptides in the lectin pulldown in a 20 minute mass spectrometry run. The initial discovery and verification was done with two previous cohorts of n=50 and n=266 respectively. These produced models for diagnosis of disease states that achieved good discrimination with AUROC values for the best two models of 0.82 and 0.87.
This current study was derived from analysis of a further independent cohort of samples from the Victorian Cancer Biobank centred around oesophageal adenocarcinoma and its detection versus a range of controls. The models developed in the discovery cohort were applied to the Victorian Biobank samples and produced a range of strong correlations for the combinations of biomarkers against disease. These results further strengthen the development of a clinically viable diagnostic test for detection of early to late-stage oesophageal adenocarcinoma.