Hocker JR, Lerner M, Lightfoot SA, et al. - As cases with diabetes mellitus (DM) exhibit acceleration in coronary artery disease (CAD) and atherosclerosis, the causes of most heart attacks, researchers sought to ascertain the biomolecules involved in these inter-related disease processes in order to develop methodology to help identify and monitor CAD patients with and without T2DM. They analyzed sera of cases with CAD, with and without type (T) 2DM, who are about to undergo coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Serum biomolecule mass profiling is utilized as the patient discriminatory methodology. The sera of a group of CAD patients can be distinguished from controls with this mass spectrometry (MS) approach, with the CAD group containing both T2DM and non-diabetic patients. This indicates no appreciable interference of the T2DM phenotype with the CAD determination vs control individuals. However, sera from a group of T2DM CAD patients could be distinguished from those from non-T2DM CAD patients, suggesting the possible utility of this MS methodology for examining the T2DM phenotype within the CAD disease state. MS/MS peptide structure analysis was performed on the same serum samples used in the CAD T2DM vs non-T2DM binary group comparison to identify potential biochemical and phenotypic changes linked with CAD and T2DM. Identification of such peptide/protein could result in enhanced understanding of underlying mechanisms, additional biomarkers for distinguishing and monitoring these disease conditions, and potential therapeutic targets. By performing bioinformatics/systems biology analysis of the peptide/protein changes linked with CAD and T2DM, they identified cell pathways/systems affected, which include atherosclerosis, DM, fibrosis, lipogenesis, loss of cellularity (apoptosis), and inflammation.