A pattern of protein expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells distinguishes rheumatoid arthritis patients from healthy individuals.

We compared the expression levels of proteins in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of healthy control individuals to those of patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) using a proteomics approach. Using two-dimensional electrophoresis we identified 18 proteins that were 2-fold or more highly expressed in patients than in controls, and 11 proteins that were 2-fold or more highly expressed in controls than in patients. Some of these differentially expressed proteins, identified by MALDI-TOF spectrometry, have previously been shown to play a potential role in the pathogenesis of RA. Hierarchical cluster analyses of the data segregated the samples into two groups, one which contained only controls and the other which contained only patients, and was used to compare the expression pattern of these 29 proteins in individual samples with the median expression pattern determined in the healthy control and in the RA patient groups. This analyses was able to predict whether a sample was derived from a rheumatoid arthritis patient or from a healthy individual, suggesting that a comparison of such protein expression patterns may be of diagnostic value.