5 years later -- where are we in proteomic biomarkers in body fluids?

 

I'm 90-ish percent sure that the last review is on this blog somewhere, but forget that one - check out this new one! 

Here's the thing -- the 2017 or 2018 one pointed out that proteomics was 

.....too slooooooooooooooooooowwww.... for what we needed for real biomarker discovery (big cohort size to encapsulate human variation).

Slow instruments, slow data processing, slow data integration with clinically revelant information. 

And you could take a step back and think that maybe this was written on a wall somewhere and this group spent a lot of time integrating every technique they could to start checking things off the wall. And where they didn't integrate, they created. 

Obviously not the only group really pushing things out from the discovery phase toward the clinic, I think Jenny's group at Cedars is on pace to double the number of LCMS based clinical assays that exist here in the US in the very near future. And...you'll see a lot of adoption of the same types of technology out there as you see reviewed in this study.

Now....the downer in this review is that we do honestly need to start thinking about ethical use of our data and how to ensure that when we're obtaining deeper understanding of our patient samples. It's only a matter of time before we'll absolutely have to start using encrypted storage servers for our data and instituting document storage/destruction protocols and it will be interesting to see who mandates that first. 

I'll stop here before this post gets longer than the review, but if you need some optimism injected in your day, it's short and open access and we've come a long way in 5 short years. And that's actually only 3 because COVID years don't count against us in any way.