SOME APPLICATIONS OF MASS SPECTROMETRY IN MONITORING PATHOLOGICAL STATES

Pietro Traldi

CNR ISTM, Corso Stati Uniti 4, Padova (Italy)

In the last decade the applications of mass spectrometry in the medical field have shown a fantastic grown, mainly due on one hand to the development and use of the newest mass spectrometric techniques, on the other to the physician consciousness of the high specificity and analytical power of these new techniques.
In the present communication two experiences of the our group will be described. 
The first pertains the use of mass spectrometry in the study of in vitro and in vivo non enzymatic protein glycation, a process which is of medical relevance either in diabetes or in the end stage renal disease. In particular MALDI/MS and ESI/MS have been shown to be precious tools to investigate this problem, allowing either the accurate definition of the number of glucose molecules condensed or a specific protein or the identification of the preferred glycation sites.
The second topic is related to the use of mass spectrometry to identify possible markers of cancer development. For this aim the plasma and serum protein profiles of a population of healthy subjects, obtained by MALDI/MS, have been compared with those from patients bearing colon-rectal cancer or melanoma. Clear differences were put in evidence, consisting, in the case of patients, of an underexpression of proteins present in healthy subjects and in the production of new polypeptides.
These preliminary results suggest that MALDI/MS can be successfully employed for diagnostic purposes.