We analyse the proteomic profiles of AYA sarcomas – Paul Huang Lab

Paul Huang Lab shared on X/Twitter:

“Our new paper ‘Proteomic features of soft tissue sarcomas in adolescents and young adults (AYA)’ is out in Communications Medicine.

We analyse the proteomic profiles of AYA sarcomas and compared them with those from older patients.

What did we find out? A

Adolescent and young adult sarcoma patients are an underserved patient group with disparities in treatment and survival outcomes compared to other age groups.

We wondered if there are biological differences between tumours from AYA patients versus older adult patients.

We show that indeed tumours from older patients have distinct biology compared to those in the AYA age group.

For instance, sarcomas from older adults have higher levels of MYC oncogene signalling compared to AYA patients.

Strikingly, AYA patients have significantly lower levels of components of the spliceosome complex machinery compared to older adults.

Moreover, sarcoma cells derived from older patients but not AYA patients displayed unique vulnerabilities to knockdown of splicing genes.

Importantly, expression levels of the spliceosome, particularly the U2 snRNP subcomplex are prognostic for distant metastasis in AYA sarcoma patients.

This study highlights the importance of doing age-specific studies to identify prognostic tools tailored to AYA patients.

This work was led by Leo Tam in close collaboration with Robin Lewis Jones, Tom Wei-Wu Chen and Anguraj Sadanandam, and is supported by The ICR, The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Science and Innovation at Cancer Research UK, Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group, Little Princess Trust and NIHR Royal Marsden BRC with ICR London and CRF.”

Source: Paul Huang Lab/X