Inquiries About Biomarkers of Acute Liver Failure in Patients Who Underwent Living Donor Liver Transplantation Using a Protein Chip Array

The causative agent of hepatic encephalopathy (HE) has not been identified with certainty. The recovery of consciousness in patients with acute liver failure (ALF) who underwent liver transplantation (LT) is sometimes drastic ; therefore, we thought that the causative agents of HE would change markedly peri-operatively in these patients. We examined the biomarkers including new agents in the serum of patients using the ProteinChip® System 4000 (Ciphergen Biosystems, Yokohama, JAPAN). Sixteen samples were obtained from four patients with ALF who underwent living donor LT (LDLT) at four time points ; pre-operative, one post-operative day (1POD), 3POD, and 7POD. We used three chips made by the Biomek2000 robot. All duplicated samples were assayed and analyzed using the CiphergenExpressTM data manager. We divided the peri-operative changes in the intensity of identified peaks into seven patterns. The number of peaks whose intensity shows significant changes peri-operatively reached 755. Of course, it is difficult to determine each structure in all 755 peaks ; therefore, we should narrow down the candidates for causative agents of HE in further studies. Our own results suggest that many difficulties lie ahead in determining the causative agent of HE.