Non-invasive diagnosis and assessment of patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC): The importance of serum proteome profiling with SELDI-TOF-MS – preliminary results

Aims: Liver biopsy is the gold standard to assess whether or not fibrosis in CHC is advancing, stable or regressing and to provide prognostic and therapeutic information. A promising approach to non-invasive biomarker discovery referring to diagnose CHC and differentiating mild from moderate/advanced stage of liver disease is protein profiling using surface enhanced laser desorption/ionisation (SELDI)-based ProteinChip® technology. Aims: To evaluate the potential value of this technique, sera of 12 patients with CHC (6 male/6 female, median age 45 years) and 12 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (6 male/6 fem…