Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a complex disease with an incidence rate of about 1 in 1000 per year. Despite the availability of validated biomarkers for VTE, unprovoked events account for 50% of first events. Therefore, emerging high-throughput proteomics are promising methods for the expansion of VTE biomarkers. One such promising high-throughput platform is SomaScan, which uses a large library of synthetic oligonucleotide ligands known as aptamers to measure thousands of proteins.
Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the viability of the aptamer-based SomaScan platform for VTE studies by examining its agreement with standard laboratory methods.
Methods: We examined the agreement between eight established VTE biomarkers measured by SomaScan and standard laboratory immunoassay and viscosity-based instruments in 54 individuals (27 cases and 27 controls) from the Thrombophilia, Hypercoagulability and Environmental Risks in Venous Thromboembolism study. We performed the agreement analysis by using a regression model and predicting the estimates and the 95% prediction interval (PI) of the laboratory instrument values using SomaScan values.
Results: SomaScan measurements exhibited overall poor agreement, particularly for D-dimer (average fit, 492.7 ng/mL; 95% PI, 110.0-1998.2) and fibrinogen (average fit, 3.3 g/L; 95% PI, 2.0-4.7).
Conclusion: Our results indicate that SomaScan measurement had poor agreement with the standard laboratory measurements. These results may explain why some genome-wide association studies with VTE proteins measured by SomaScan did not confirm previously identified loci. Therefore, SomaScan should be considered with caution in VTE studies.
Keywords: aptamers; biomarkers; blood coagulation factors; immunoassay; nucleotide; proteomics; venous thrombosis.
© 2021 The Authors. Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH).