In
papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC),
metastasis is a feature of an aggressive
tumor phenotype. To identify
protein biomarkers that distinguish patients with an aggressive
tumor behavior, proteomic signatures in metastatic and non-metastatic
tumors were investigated comparatively. In particular, matrix-assisted
laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) was used to analyze primary
tumor samples. We investigated a
tumor cohort of PTC (n = 118) that were matched for age,
tumor stage, and gender. Proteomic screening by MALDI-IMS was performed for a discovery set (n = 29).
Proteins related to the discriminating mass peaks were identified by 1D-gel electrophoresis followed by mass spectrometry. The candidate
proteins were subsequently validated by immunohistochemistry (IHC) using a tissue microarray for an independent PTC validation set (n = 89). In this study, we found 36 mass-to-charge-ratio (m/z) species that specifically distinguished metastatic from non-metastatic
tumors, among which m/z 11,608 was identified as
thioredoxin, m/z 11,184 as S100-A10, and m/z 10,094 as S100-A6. Furthermore, using IHC on the validation set, we showed that the overexpression of these three
proteins was highly associated with
lymph node metastasis in PTC (p < 0.005). For functional analysis of the
metastasis-specific
proteins, we performed an Ingenuity Pathway Analysis and discovered a strong relationship of all candidates with the TGF-β-dependent EMT pathway. Our results demonstrated the potential application of the MALDI-IMS proteomic approach in identifying
protein markers of
metastasis in PTC. The novel
protein markers identified in this study may be used for risk stratification regarding metastatic potential in PTC.