Proteomics provides individualized options of precision medicine for patients with gastric cancer

While precision medicine driven by genome sequencing has revolutionized cancer care, such as lung cancer, its impact on gastric cancer (GC) has been minimal. GC patients are routinely treated with chemotherapy, but only a fraction of them receive the clinical benefit. There is an urgent need to develop biomarkers or algorithms to select chemo-sensitive patients or apply targeted therapy. Here, we carried out retrospective analyses of 1,020 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded GC surgical resection samples from 5 hospitals and developed a mass spectrometry-based workflow for proteomic subtyping of GC. We identified two proteomic subtypes: the chemo-sensitive group (CSG) and the chemo-insensitive group (CIG) in the discovery set. The 5-year overall survival of CSG was significantly improved in patients who had received adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery compared with those who received surgery only (64.2% vs. 49.6%; Cox P -value=0.002), whereas no such improvement was observed in CIG (50.0% vs. 58.6%; Cox P -value=0.495). We validated these results in an independent validation set. Further, differential proteome analysis uncovered 9 FDA-approved drugs that may be applicable for targeted therapy of GC. A prospective study is warranted to test these findings for future GC patient care.