Proteomic analyses identify HK1 and ATP5A to be overexpressed in distant metastases of lung adenocarcinomas compared to matched primary tumors.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide with lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) being the most common type. Genomic studies of LUAD have advanced our understanding of its tumor biology and accelerated targeted therapy. However, the proteomic characteristics of LUAD are still insufficiently explored. The prognosis for lung cancer patients is still mostly determined by the stage of disease at the time of diagnosis. Focusing on late-stage metastatic LUAD with poor prognosis, we compared the proteomic profiles of primary tumors and matched distant metastases to identify relevant and potentially druggable differences. We performed high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS) on a total of 38 FFPE (formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded) samples. Using differential expression analysis and unsupervised clustering we identified several proteins that were differentially regulated in metastases compared to matched primary tumors. Selected proteins (HK1, ATP5A, SRI and ARHGDIB) were subjected to validation by immunoblotting. Thereby, significant differential expression could be confirmed for HK1 and ATP5A, both upregulated in metastases compared to matched primary tumors. Our findings give a better understanding of tumor progression and metastatic spreads in LUAD but also demonstrate considerable inter-individual heterogeneity on the proteomic level.