RCC is the third most frequent malignancy of the genitourinary tract accounting for about 90% of all renal malignancies and the most fatal urological cancer, causing approximately 2% of all cancer deaths. It is noteworthy that this carcinoma is one of the human cancers with an increasing incidence. WZ4002 supply Currently, as RCC is typically asymptomatic, most cases are frequently detected as an incidental renal mass, imaging the abdomen for other reasons such as during the work-up of acute renal failure. About 30% of RCC patients will present metastases at the time of the diagnosis, many others will develop metastasis after surgical resection and for these patients the prognosis is dismal. Indeed, treatment of metastatic RCC remains highly challenging since its progressionfree survival is very poor among these patients. Traditionally RCC is known to be refractory to chemotherapy and to radiotherapy. Surgical removal of the tumour is considered the only effective treatment and, where feasible, may result in remission in up to 40–60% of cases. Management of RCC is benefiting from the increasing role of small tumour masses detection, greater understanding of the metabolic pathways involved. Although in the absence of biomarkers, renal imaging is most often recommended by advocates of screening, a confident histological classification and diagnosis with this technique is not always feasible, especially for some ambiguous cystic and solid renal lesions. Therefore, early diagnosis could highly improve survival rates for patients with renal cancer and also for those with localized tumours. Moreover, welfare will benefit from a test able to distinguish small kidney malignant masses from benign lesions driving the patient to low or high intense follow-up. The present work is focused on the application of a single-step purification using C8 functionalized magnetic beads followed by MALDI-TOF analysis and nLC-ESI-MS/MS to explore possible urinary peptide signatures of patients affected by ccRCC, by other kidney tumours and control subjects. Thus far, many studies performed using Western blot analysis have reported several proteins with an altered urinary concentration in RCC patients, relative to control subjects, with potential diagnostic/prognostic capabilities. An over-concentration of the urinary nuclear matrix protein 22 was found in 23 of 35 RCC patients compared to 30 patients with kidney stone and renal cystis used as controls. The urinary 14-3-3 protein alpha/beta has also been shown to be in a higher concentration in RCC patient urine compared to that from healthy volunteers samples. The diagnostic capability of this protein resulted in an AUC of 0.88. Two other proteins, Aquaporin-1 and Peirilin-2, were observed to be at higher levels in the urine of 63 RCC patients versus 43 healthy subjects. The sensitivity and specificity values were in the range of 90–100% for both these proteins.