A Universal Quantitative Strategy of Proteins Based on MS Multiple Reaction Monitoring and its Application in HCC Biomarker Verification

The development of biomarkers with high sensitivity and high specificity is in the urgent need for early diagnosis of liver cancer. The process of biomarker research has been greatly accelerated in recent years by using proteomics methods. However, because of the difficulties of antibody development, conventional verification methods have become a bottleneck in the biomarker development. In this study, we developed a fast absolute quantification strategy which combined the optimized 18O labeling of proteins with MRM-MS based quantitative analysis and successfully used it to verify two biomarker candidates of HCC in undepleted serum.