Proteomics: a new diagnostic frontier

Abstract

Background: Analysis of proteins has been an integral part of the field of clinical chemistry for decades. Recent advances in technology and complete identification of the human genome sequence have opened up new opportunities for analysis of proteins for clinical diagnostic purposes.

Methods: Content of a recent conference of proteomics is summarized.

Results: New analytical methods allow the simultaneous analysis of a large number of proteins in biological fluids such as serum and plasma, offering partial views of the complete set of proteins or proteome. Plasma presents many analytical challenges, such as the complexity of components, predominance of a few major components, and the large concentration range of components, but the number of proteins that can be detected in plasma has expanded dramatically from hundreds to thousands. At the same time, there is increased capability to detect structural variations of proteins. Recent studies also identified the presence of complex sets of small protein fragments in plasma. This set of protein fragments, the fragmentome or peptidome, is potentially a rich source of information about physiologic and disease processes.

Conclusions: Advances in proteomics offer great promise for the discovery of markers that might serve as the basis for new clinical laboratory tests. There are many challenges, however, in the translation of newly discovered markers into clinical laboratory tests.