Clinical proteomics promise improved disease diagnosis

Clinical proteomics could revolutionise the clinical testing market in years to come, according to a recent report published by market research company BioInformatics.

Based on a detailed survey, Clinical Proteomics: A First-Glance Market Report provides the thoughts of more than 300 proteomic researchers on the disease applications, assay formats and technical standards for protein-profiling assays that will be used for disease prognosis or diagnosis in a clinical setting.

Rather than focusing on genetic alterations that may lead to a particular disease, many researchers believe that changes in protein expression patterns are the most accurate way to identify diseases in their early stages and to determine the most effective courses of treatment. In fact, some 40% of those scientists performing protein-profiling do so with the objective of identifying protein expression patterns associated with diseases.

The future of clinical proteomics appears to lie in two technologies: mass spectrometry and protein arrays/chips, the report claims. Although current mass spectrometers may be limited in their abilities to create reliable protein profiles from unprocessed biological samples, it seems likely that instruments with higher mass accuracy, increased dynamic range and better resolution will eventually appear, greatly extending the usefulness of mass spectrometry in a clinical setting. One of the most promising applications for mass spectrometry, from a clinical proteomics perspective, involves detecting proteins that are captured on protein chips.

Protein arrays/chips are used by 23% of the respondents for protein profiling. Researchers often use the same instrumentation for producing and analysing protein arrays as they do for DNA microarrays. However, there are significant differences between nucleic acids and proteins, particularly in protein stability and conformation requirements, which add an extra degree of challenge to protein array studies.

Although protein-profiling is currently used for a va-riety of research applications, the technology has not yet been adopted as a routine method for clinical testing. Respondents most frequently cited lack of adequate reference databases for disease biomarker evaluation, difficulty obtaining clinical samples and sample quality as the limitations they face.

As these and other challenges are addressed, the opportunities for clinical proteomics will extend beyond cancer diagnostics to include applications such as antibiotic and drug sensitivity profiling, monitoring stress and cell death pathways for toxicology purposes, and measuring protein expression patterns that are characteristic of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders and a variety of other maladies, the report predicts.