Study from Kleer and Nesvizhskii Labs Reveals the Proteomic Landscape of Metaplastic Breast Carcinomas

By Elizabeth Walker | May 1 2020

Clinicopathological features of all clinical samples and summary of quantitative proteomics workflow. A) Representative histology images (H&E) and diagnoses on our patient cohort including normal breast, non-MBC triple-negative, and each metaplastic subtype (spindle, squamous, sarcomatoid or mixed). Scale bar = xx μm. B) Quantitative mass spectrometry profiling workflow using a total of 27 clinical tissue samples for LC-MS/MS tandem mass tag (TMT) isobaric labeling and two novel pipelines of computational methods. Philosopher was used for label-free quantification and TMT-Integrator for filtering, PSM selection, normalization, and generation of a combined protein expression table for downstream statistical analyses.  Along with co-investigators, Sabra Djomehri, a graduate student in Celina Kleer's Laboratory, has discovered the proteomic landscape of metaplastic carcinomas, the most aggressive type of triple negative breast cancer. The study, published in Nature Communications, reveals specific protein expression patterns in the different histopathological subtypes of metaplastic carcinoma. These include translational and ribosomal events in the spindle subtype, inflammation, and apical junction related proteins in squamous, and extracellular matrix proteins in sarcomatoid subtypes.

The lab is excited to provide insights into the protein profiles underlying the pathological diversity and aggressiveness of these tumors and hopes that these results will aid in the development of new therapeutics. Read the entire paper at Nature.com.