Okay, so I was going to type something like "I don't know where to start" but that's a lie. I should probably start by apologizing for being such a jerk about the city that hosted US HUPO. I'm pretty pissed off about the state of my country basically all the time. I'm particularly frustrated about watching the news and grinding my teeth last week enough that I had to go to the conference with a broken tooth. And some geographic areas are more at fault for the rapid decline of my country than others. Whining about it doesn't change things, and that's why I am running for a government office in my abundant spare time. But that's not what this is about.
St. Louis was a fantastic venue for US HUPO and I'm leaving here very happy that John Yates invited me to join the advisory board so I couldn't just sit at home being a jerk about the conference location.
The conference was a little smaller than some previous ones with something around 550 people. Because it is a Conference Solutions organized event - it was very very organized. I'm not throwing shade deliberately at International HUPO, but one of those things is not like the other.
You could literally stumble outside (I'd assume, I didn't stumble much cause had a lot of responsibilities so I was BOOOORRRIIING during this conference), and there you go - the St. Louis Arch. Apparently you can go into it!
It was a super relaxed conference. ASMS divided by 100. US HUPO Chicago/2 for intensity. 550 people with plenty of room to walk would do that.
Obviously the science on display was nucking futs.
BIASED Highlights?
1)There must be 10 different plasma nanoparticle enrichment technologies on display! There is some paradigm shifting shit going on right now. For real, I have to change some slides. Biomarker discovery goes like this
- Build a statistically valid cohort and get SOLID TISSUE from them. Do amazing proteomics on healthy and not healthy
-Build a validation cohort in SOLID TISSUES
-Get some plasma and find out that you can't see any of those fucking proteins in plasma.
Major conversation I had with some of the best proteomics scientists in the world (that I'm not at all sure why they talk to me) Matt Foster (Duke), Ryan Kelly (BYU), Brett Phinney (UCDavis) have been like this.
Wait. Can we just do blood? Skip the organs? Speed EVERYTHING up? It might be real.
2) Blood/serum/plasma proteomes might be stable for decades!
Okay - so you know how a lot of us have access to these weird repositories of tens or hundreds of thousands of blood/serum/plasma samples? Come on, you have probably stepped back and thought "I bet most of that old stuff is worthless, right?
The first US HUPO 2026 talk I saw (I spoke at 7:15am, or I probably wouldn't have seen it...) was Jan Muntel showing how they did thousands of proteomes of plasma from a Johns Hopkins / NIA study. Some of those samples were 30 years old! Baltimore is an amazing city, but it doesn't have the most stable power grid, particularly the area around the Hopkins campus. So...if you could get consistent non batchy effecty data from that, then all of these repositories are about a million times more valuable than I ever thought they were.
This text is making me bored, so here's a photo of some really tall guy and me in a jacket I got for $10 years ago that only fits thanks to an extra 15 pounds (yay!) and Jan! Watch out for a paper from him. I hate asking questions on microphones but totally needed to know if the PTMs had any value. He should know soon!
Highlight number 3)
Might be a lowlight. I might be getting old, yo.
Point 1) A researcher I first met when she was a new grad student with Michelle Cilia is now a PI with her own lab and is apparently being a super cool influence on my favorite US HUPO committee (Ed&Out Reach, previously VMO). Keep an eye on Dr. Angela Kruse and her lab.
Ed&Out is now very focused on making proteomics more approachable! Check out this video!
Point 2) I'm pretty sure I just had my mid-life crisis thing and went back to academia, right? Right? So it's impossible that a High School Student who worked in my academic lab gave a lightning talk and had a ridiculously cool poster. I can claim absolutely zero (not being humble, real life zero) credit for the success of Fatima Sarfraz. She did a summer rotation with an incredible PhD candidate (Dr. Abigail Wheeler) and I had no part in anything but trying to stay out of the way and being positive and encouraging of whatever they were doing. Fatima presented better data at some of our weekly meetings that summer than some of the grad students and postdocs. When I found out she was going to Princeton the very least I could do was alert the impossibly charismatic, and apparently immortal, Ileana Cristae that she was coming. Apparently, that worked out, and clearly biased, but it might have been one of my favorite lighting talks.
Highlight number 4)
Who am I kidding? I've easily been to 200 conferences by now.
The US HUPO lightning talks are THE BEST, COOLEST, FUNNIEST thing I've ever seen at any of them. I had two invited talks and the only thing that I get stressed out about is
SITTING ON STAGE IN A SPARKLY SUIT READING OUT NAMES.
These people have 60 seconds to pitch their research and I could stutter and mess it up. We butcher names. It worries me.
We had rapping, we had juggling, we had the best karaoke I've ever heard, and it was about all the different ways you could do PASEF DIA method. Yes, that won an award.
The winner of lightning was the same BYU undergrad who won it the last 2 years.
If you're in marketing in a proteomics company and you don't have a 7 figure multi-year contract ready to offer that young man before he graduates, you're a dumbass. He could sell me SomaScan. He'd have to possibly send the first spreadsheet of data showing that SomaScan works, and then do a Queen tribute to it, but - for real - heads up.
Highlight number 5)
It only costs $54 to make a life sized cutout of a person who couldn't attend a conference because it's on his/her kid's birthday. I told Mike Washburn when we passed on an escalator - I'm about to set up my favorite joke of the conference.
I put a 6 foot tall, so almost real life sized, cutout of Dr. Benjamin Neely around the conference. Sometimes I'd stop by to make sure no one vandalized him. OMG. Best $50 ever. I did not set this the following photo up. I found him trying to get people to take free conference swag.
I'd occasionally get random photos and I'm pretty sure he did too.
Edit - found a few more!
Somehow related. For real, you had to be here to see how much amazing chaos this was during lightning.
The ultra talented US HUPO President Dr. Ben Garcia, doing a proteomics centric parody of a song from the Barbie movie that is about male fragility was THE FUNNIEST THING EVER. Except for the first lightning I ever saw with Ileana Cristae. OMG. So funny.
Okay, I have a plane. Later!
Wait. I totally forgot. And my plane is delayed!
Proteomics people like podcasts!
Yay! 100 podcasts, and some number one the screen the final day said a preposterous number of listens to said podcast. Like e4s of listens. So there you go. We should probably record some more. I just wrote Neely to ask when Season 11 recording starts. I had so much fun at US HUPO I might ask them if they want to partner on another one. We finally found inspiration for one.
As I'm fixing blatant airport typos this one is cool.
You can't be an important member of the leadership of US HUPO forever. John Yates gave Ben Garcia a funny president hat as he moves onto some role at some ASMS thing, and some other people passed the torch as well. We're all grateful for the effort they've put into steering the organization to what it is now.
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