Modeling and integration of N-glycan biomarkers in a comprehensive biomarker data model.

Molecular biomarkers measure discrete components of biological processes that can contribute to disorders when impaired. Great interest exists in discovering early cancer biomarkers to improve outcomes. Biomarkers represented in a standardized data model, integrated with multi-omics data, may improve the understanding and use of novel biomarkers such as glycans and glycoconjugates. Among altered components in tumorigenesis, N-glycans exhibit substantial biomarker potential, when analyzed with their protein carriers. However, such data are distributed across publications and databases of diverse formats, which hamper their use in research and clinical application. Mass spectrometry measures of 50 N-glycans on 7 serum proteins in liver disease were integrated (as a panel) into a cancer biomarker data model, providing a unique identifier, standard nomenclature, links to glycan resources, and accession and ontology annotations to standard protein, gene, disease, and biomarker information. Data provenance was documented with a standardized United States Food and Drug Administration-supported BioCompute Object. Using the biomarker data model allows the capture of granular information, such as glycans with different levels of abundance in cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and transplant groups. Such representation in a standardized data model harmonizes glycomics data in a unified framework, making glycan-protein biomarker data exploration more available to investigators and to other data resources. The biomarker data model we describe can be used by researchers to describe their novel glycan and glycoconjugate biomarkers; it can integrate N-glycan biomarker data with multi-source biomedical data and can foster discovery and insight within a unified data framework for glycan biomarker representation, thereby making the data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/).

Machine learning analyses of highly-multiplexed immunofluorescence identifies distinct tumor and stromal cell populations in primary pancreatic tumors.

BACKGROUND: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a formidable challenge for patients and clinicians. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the distribution of 31 different markers in tumor and stromal portions of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and identify immune cell populations to better understand how neoplastic, non-malignant structural, and immune cells, diversify the TME and influence PDAC progression. METHODS: Whole slide imaging (WSI) and cyclic multiplexed-immunofluorescence (MxIF) was used to collect 31 different markers over the course of nine distinctive imaging series of human PDAC samples. Image registration and machine learning algorithms were developed to largely automate an imaging analysis pipeline identifying distinct cell types in the TME. RESULTS: A random forest algorithm accurately predicted tumor and stromal-rich areas with 87% accuracy using 31 markers and 77% accuracy using only five markers. Top tumor-predictive markers guided downstream analyses to identify immune populations effectively invading into the tumor, including dendritic cells, CD4+ T cells, and multiple immunoregulatory subtypes. CONCLUSIONS: Immunoprofiling of PDAC to identify differential distribution of immune cells in the TME is critical for understanding disease progression, response and/or resistance to treatment, and the development of new treatment strategies.

Cancer Biomarkers and Big Data: A Planetary Science Approach.

Cancer biomarker research has become a data-intensive discipline requiring innovative approaches for data analysis that can combine traditional and data-driven methods. Significant leveraging can be done transferring methodologies and capabilities across scientific disciplines, such as planetary science and astronomy, each of which are grappling with and developing similar solutions for the analysis of massive scientific data.

OncoMX: A Knowledgebase for Exploring Cancer Biomarkers in the Context of Related Cancer and Healthy Data.

PURPOSE: The purpose of OncoMX1 knowledgebase development was to integrate cancer biomarker and relevant data types into a meta-portal, enabling the research of cancer biomarkers side by side with other pertinent multidimensional data types. METHODS: Cancer mutation, cancer differential expression, cancer expression specificity, healthy gene expression from human and mouse, literature mining for cancer mutation and cancer expression, and biomarker data were integrated, unified by relevant biomedical ontologies, and subjected to rule-based automated quality control before ingestion into the database. RESULTS: OncoMX provides integrated data encompassing more than 1,000 unique biomarker entries (939 from the Early Detection Research Network [EDRN] and 96 from the US Food and Drug Administration) mapped to 20,576 genes that have either mutation or differential expression in cancer. Sentences reporting mutation or differential expression in cancer were extracted from more than 40,000 publications, and healthy gene expression data with samples mapped to organs are available for both human genes and their mouse orthologs. CONCLUSION: OncoMX has prioritized user feedback as a means of guiding development priorities. By mapping to and integrating data from several cancer genomics resources, it is hoped that OncoMX will foster a dynamic engagement between bioinformaticians and cancer biomarker researchers. This engagement should culminate in a community resource that substantially improves the ability and efficiency of exploring cancer biomarker data and related multidimensional data.

Summarizing performance for genome scale measurement of miRNA: reference samples and metrics.

BACKGROUND: The potential utility of microRNA as biomarkers for early detection of cancer and other diseases is being investigated with genome-scale profiling of differentially expressed microRNA. Processes for measurement assurance are critical components of genome-scale measurements. Here, we evaluated the utility of a set of total RNA samples, designed with between-sample differences in the relative abundance of miRNAs, as process controls. RESULTS: Three pure total human RNA samples (brain, liver, and placenta) and two different mixtures of these components were evaluated as measurement assurance control samples on multiple measurement systems at multiple sites and over multiple rounds. In silico modeling of mixtures provided benchmark values for comparison with physical mixtures. Biomarker development laboratories using next-generation sequencing (NGS) or genome-scale hybridization assays participated in the study and returned data from the samples using their routine workflows. Multiplexed and single assay reverse-transcription PCR (RT-PCR) was used to confirm in silico predicted sample differences. Data visualizations and summary metrics for genome-scale miRNA profiling assessment were developed using this dataset, and a range of performance was observed. These metrics have been incorporated into an online data analysis pipeline and provide a convenient dashboard view of results from experiments following the described design. The website also serves as a repository for the accumulation of performance values providing new participants in the project an opportunity to learn what may be achievable with similar measurement processes. CONCLUSIONS: The set of reference samples used in this study provides benchmark values suitable for assessing genome-scale miRNA profiling processes. Incorporation of these metrics into an online resource allows laboratories to periodically evaluate their performance and assess any changes introduced into their measurement process.

Cancer-secreted AGR2 induces programmed cell death in normal cells.

Anterior Gradient 2 (AGR2) is a protein expressed in many solid tumor types including prostate, pancreatic, breast and lung. AGR2 functions as a protein disulfide isomerase in the endoplasmic reticulum. However, AGR2 is secreted by cancer cells that overexpress this molecule. Secretion of AGR2 was also found in salamander limb regeneration. Due to its ubiquity, tumor secretion of AGR2 must serve an important role in cancer, yet its molecular function is largely unknown. This study examined the effect of cancer-secreted AGR2 on normal cells. Prostate stromal cells were cultured, and tissue digestion media containing AGR2 prepared from prostate primary cancer 10-076 CP and adenocarcinoma LuCaP 70CR xenograft were added. The control were tissue digestion media containing no AGR2 prepared from benign prostate 10-076 NP and small cell carcinoma LuCaP 145.1 xenograft. In the presence of tumor-secreted AGR2, the stromal cells were found to undergo programmed cell death (PCD) characterized by formation of cellular blebs, cell shrinkage, and DNA fragmentation as seen when the stromal cells were UV irradiated or treated by a pro-apoptotic drug. PCD could be prevented with the addition of the monoclonal AGR2-neutralizing antibody P3A5. DNA microarray analysis of LuCaP 70CR media-treated vs. LuCaP 145.1 media-treated cells showed downregulation of the gene SAT1 as a major change in cells exposed to AGR2. RT-PCR analysis confirmed the array result. SAT1 encodes spermidine/spermine N1-acetyltransferase, which maintains intracellular polyamine levels. Abnormal polyamine metabolism as a result of altered SAT1 activity has an adverse effect on cells through the induction of PCD.

Generating a focused view of disease ontology cancer terms for pan-cancer data integration and analysis.

Bio-ontologies provide terminologies for the scientific community to describe biomedical entities in a standardized manner. There are multiple initiatives that are developing biomedical terminologies for the purpose of providing better annotation, data integration and mining capabilities. Terminology resources devised for multiple purposes inherently diverge in content and structure. A major issue of biomedical data integration is the development of overlapping terms, ambiguous classifications and inconsistencies represented across databases and publications. The disease ontology (DO) was developed over the past decade to address data integration, standardization and annotation issues for human disease data. We have established a DO cancer project to be a focused view of cancer terms within the DO. The DO cancer project mapped 386 cancer terms from the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC), The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), International Cancer Genome Consortium, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments, Integrative Oncogenomics and the Early Detection Research Network into a cohesive set of 187 DO terms represented by 63 top-level DO cancer terms. For example, the COSMIC term 'kidney, NS, carcinoma, clear_cell_renal_cell_carcinoma' and TCGA term 'Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma' were both grouped to the term 'Disease Ontology Identification (DOID):4467 / renal clear cell carcinoma' which was mapped to the TopNodes_DOcancerslim term 'DOID:263 / kidney cancer'. Mapping of diverse cancer terms to DO and the use of top level terms (DO slims) will enable pan-cancer analysis across datasets generated from any of the cancer term sources where pan-cancer means including or relating to all or multiple types of cancer. The terms can be browsed from the DO web site (http://www.disease-ontology.org) and downloaded from the DO's Apache Subversion or GitHub repositories. Database URL: http://www.disease-ontology.org

A framework for organizing cancer-related variations from existing databases, publications and NGS data using a High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE).

Years of sequence feature curation by UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, PIR-PSD, NCBI-CDD, RefSeq and other database biocurators has led to a rich repository of information on functional sites of genes and proteins. This information along with variation-related annotation can be used to scan human short sequence reads from next-generation sequencing (NGS) pipelines for presence of non-synonymous single-nucleotide variations (nsSNVs) that affect functional sites. This and similar workflows are becoming more important because thousands of NGS data sets are being made available through projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and researchers want to evaluate their biomarkers in genomic data. BioMuta, an integrated sequence feature database, provides a framework for automated and manual curation and integration of cancer-related sequence features so that they can be used in NGS analysis pipelines. Sequence feature information in BioMuta is collected from the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC), ClinVar, UniProtKB and through biocuration of information available from publications. Additionally, nsSNVs identified through automated analysis of NGS data from TCGA are also included in the database. Because of the petabytes of data and information present in NGS primary repositories, a platform HIVE (High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment) for storing, analyzing, computing and curating NGS data and associated metadata has been developed. Using HIVE, 31 979 nsSNVs were identified in TCGA-derived NGS data from breast cancer patients. All variations identified through this process are stored in a Curated Short Read archive, and the nsSNVs from the tumor samples are included in BioMuta. Currently, BioMuta has 26 cancer types with 13 896 small-scale and 308 986 large-scale study-derived variations. Integration of variation data allows identifications of novel or common nsSNVs that can be prioritized in validation studies. Database URL: BioMuta: http://hive.biochemistry.gwu.edu/tools/biomuta/index.php; CSR: http://hive.biochemistry.gwu.edu/dna.cgi?cmd=csr; HIVE: http://hive.biochemistry.gwu.edu.

Bioinformatics: biomarkers of early detection.

Capturing, sharing, and publishing cancer biomarker research data are all fundamental challenges of enabling new opportunities to research and understand scientific data. Informatics experts from the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) have pioneered a principled informatics infrastructure to capture and disseminate data from biomarker validation studies, in effect, providing a national-scale, real-world successful example of how to address these challenges. EDRN is a distributed, collaborative network and it requires its infrastructure to support research across cancer research institutions and across their individual laboratories. The EDRN informatics infrastructure is also referred to as the EDRN Knowledge Environment, or EKE. EKE connects information about biomarkers, studies, specimens and resulting scientific data, allowing users to search, download and compare each of these disparate sources of cancer research information. EKE's data is enriched by providing annotations that describe the research results (biomarkers, protocols, studies) and that link the research results to the captured information within EDRN (raw instrument datasets, specimens, etc.). In addition EKE provides external links to public resources related to the research results and captured data. EKE has leveraged and reused data management software technologies originally developed for planetary and earth science research results and has infused those capabilities into biomarker research. This paper will describe the EDRN Knowledge Environment, its deployment to the EDRN enterprise, and how a number of these challenges have been addressed through the capture and curation of biomarker data results.