The aim of our research is to confirm the presence in the blood of specific proteins that we have identified as being highly overexpressed in diseased tissue from patients with fibrotic or inflammatory diseases, or solid gastrointestinal tumours including liver, colorectal and pancreatic cancers. These circulating proteins, if confirmed to be specific for disease states in large real-world patient datasets, would constitute valuable easily-accessible biomarkers to identify patients with the disease, to potentially indicate specific treatment options related to the presence of specific proteins, and to follow disease evolution under treatment. Datasets will be interrogated to validate the presence of candidate targets linked to disease pathologies including fibrosis, inflammation and oncology identified by our in-house platform and experiments. These will be examined primarily with descriptive and linear statistics to validate the presence of circulating biomarkers in appropriate patient groups. Methods will include: t-tests, regression, correlation analyses, overlap analyses (enrichment) and clustering.
