الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Prostate cancer is a major health problem worldwide. It is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer among males both in developing and developed countries. The great impact of PCa regarding the morbidity and mortality necessitates the use of investigations to discover the disease in an early stage. The use of PSA and DRE have helped with screening and early diagnosis of PCa and till now they are the most useful tools in clinical practice especially when combined with biopsy.
Due to the disadvantages of PSA as regard to sensitivity, specificity, there is a need for more reliable blood-based tests that can be used effectively for PCa screening and diagnosis. These tests, ideally, should have better sensitivity and specificity than PSA which excludes the use of biopsy for a confident and early diagnosis.
With the rapid advance in proteomic technologies, we can explore the low molecular part of the plasma proteome for tumor markers. This can be done using mass spectrometry to detect this portion of the proteome. The use of multiple markers increases the sensitivity and specificity and thereby increases the confidence for use in early diagnosis than using a single one. Therefore, discovering a profile or panel of multiple peptides or proteins will be a great breakthrough in achieving the aim of blood-based non-invasive test for prostate cancer screening and early diagnosis.
As these markers are present in the low molecular part of the proteome masked by the highly abundant proteins, there will be a need for the use of an effective separation technology. The use of magnetic beads offers a great solution where these micro-chromatography particles can separate proteins based on specific physicochemical criteria. Also, there is a need for software analysis of the data obtained from mass spectrometry for accurate determination of the most suitable profile using the relevant statistical tests. ClinProTools system of Bruker Daltonics offers the best combination of magnetic beads (MBs) for sample separation, MALDI-TOF MS analyzer for data acquisition from the sample and powerful software (ClinProToolsTM) to analyze the resultant data statistically.
Chromatography WCX-MBs were used in this research, which bind proteins of the mass range 1-10 kDa, Ultraflextreme MALDI-TOF MS and ClinProToolsTM V 3.0 for profile generation. Each group was divided from the patients and the control subjects into two independent sets randomly: a training set (n=26) and a validation set (n=24). Using GA on the training sets, a profile of 5 peaks was discovered with a recognition capability of 100 % and an overall cross validati