Plasma Biomarkers for Detecting Hodgkin's Lymphoma in HIV Patients

The lifespan of people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has increased as a result of effective antiretroviral therapy, and the incidences of the AIDS-defining cancers, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Kaposi sarcoma, have declined. Even so, HIV-infected individuals are now at greater risk of other cancers, including Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL). To identify candidate biomarkers for the early detection of HL, we undertook an accurate mass and elution time tag proteomics analysis of individual plasma samples from either HIV-infected patients without HL (controls; n = 14) and from HIV-infected patient samples with HL (n = 22). This analysis identified 60 proteins that were statistically (p<0.05) altered and at least 1.5-fold different between the two groups. At least three of these proteins have previously been reported to be altered in the blood of HL patients that were not known to be HIV positive, suggesting that these markers may be broadly useful for detecting HL. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis software identified “inflammatory response” and “cancer” as the top two biological functions associated with these proteins. Overall, this study validated three plasma proteins as candidate biomarkers for detecting HL, and identified 57 novel candidate biomarkers that remain to be validated. The relationship of these novel candidate biomarkers with cancer and inflammation suggests that they are truly associated with HL and therefore may be useful for the early detection of this cancer in susceptible populations.