The Case for Proteomics and Phosphoproteomics in the Clinic!

After a couple of days of somewhat successfully skirting any discussion of politics with my family for the holidays - with one extremely notable exception, I'm so pumped to type something that people with a similar mindset might read one day.

What about this for building some consensus?

Where are we now? What are the challenges ahead? What do we need to do next? Yo, I'll let them tell you what....

This review has study after study that has shown the promise of proteomics to impact patient health. Now -- you can probably guess where the big technological need is in the personalized space from the picture at the top. HLA peptides still suuuuuuuck. Blech. Yes. We need help on that side, but from many of the other areas we're good to go. We just need a shot. And ...as the paragraph above says ...more chances to prove that we know how to do this stuff.

I highlighted my favorite words: because you know what the medical community is good at? Openness to shifts. That's me being sarcastic, if you can't tell.

I love the angle on the phosphostuff here, because you sure don't here these cancer people in the clinic talking about protein abundance all that much -- they're all rambling about the "phospho status" of this protein or that one, and doing Westerns and ELISAs to check them. Which, yo, it's almost 2020. Western blots are fucking stupid. I'm not the first person to say that, but if you need someone to reference that statement to, I'm cool with you quoting me. Here's some semi-coherent reasons why. I'm pretty sure ELISAs are stupid as well, but I'm not sure I've ever actually done one, so I'm not sure I feel qualified to make such a strong statement.

A big thing that we're kind of missing in our realm might be the incorporation of -omics data with clinical data. We're not exactly running away with loads of stuff that can help us make these connections, but -- realistically -- we can steal that stuff from the GWAS people!  (There are good examples, of course, but they aren't integrated into a lot of the more common software programs.)

This is a beautiful, optimistic, and valuable review and -- I'm a few months late on posting it (11 months) but it is definitely worth a read!