Thank you Eric for the well written article on a blood protein analyses correlated with Biobank data. Let’s hope that the accelerate disease prevention and drug discovery. When will these analyses supplant CBC, Chem, Lipid panels, etc?
Maybe what is needed is a graphical representation of the clusters of proteins with their disease and drug discovery implications. Another graphical representation of the clusters of proteins with disease prevention would drive the point for practicality. Finally, a ven diagram of the intersection between current laboratory tests and clusters of proteins may serve to map the information content of the new onto the old tests or vice-a-versa. Medical schools and teaching hospitals could take this information to train the new generations. Current conventional clinical machines and labs, and insurance reimbursement should not be an impediment to progress. Finally, an antidote to anti-science sentiment is badly needed!
Thank you for this article! So much exciting information to follow up with for the future, and the potential positive impacts on human health guidelines and preventative recommendations.
Thank you, Eric, for this thoughtful review. It’s great to see that the technological advances the field of proteomics has made in the last decade are reaching large scale population studies and driving our better understand of health and disease. You do highlight the importance of protein diversity such as isoforms but none of the technologies you mentioned is particularly good at differentiating proteoforms. I was surprised that you didn’t highlight mass spectrometry as this is the only method that allows us to study proteoforms (isoforms, PTMs and even point mutations) in a truly hypothesis-free mode. Particle-based enrichment approaches followed by MS now deliver in the range of 7000-9000 plasma proteins and more than 100,000 peptides from as little as 100-200 ul plasma and that’s well below the 1K price point you mentioned.
Thank you Eric for the well written article on a blood protein analyses correlated with Biobank data. Let’s hope that the accelerate disease prevention and drug discovery. When will these analyses supplant CBC, Chem, Lipid panels, etc?
I hope we’ll see this soon but things never move too fast in medicine!
Maybe what is needed is a graphical representation of the clusters of proteins with their disease and drug discovery implications. Another graphical representation of the clusters of proteins with disease prevention would drive the point for practicality. Finally, a ven diagram of the intersection between current laboratory tests and clusters of proteins may serve to map the information content of the new onto the old tests or vice-a-versa. Medical schools and teaching hospitals could take this information to train the new generations. Current conventional clinical machines and labs, and insurance reimbursement should not be an impediment to progress. Finally, an antidote to anti-science sentiment is badly needed!
Thank you for this article! So much exciting information to follow up with for the future, and the potential positive impacts on human health guidelines and preventative recommendations.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thank you, Eric, for this thoughtful review. It’s great to see that the technological advances the field of proteomics has made in the last decade are reaching large scale population studies and driving our better understand of health and disease. You do highlight the importance of protein diversity such as isoforms but none of the technologies you mentioned is particularly good at differentiating proteoforms. I was surprised that you didn’t highlight mass spectrometry as this is the only method that allows us to study proteoforms (isoforms, PTMs and even point mutations) in a truly hypothesis-free mode. Particle-based enrichment approaches followed by MS now deliver in the range of 7000-9000 plasma proteins and more than 100,000 peptides from as little as 100-200 ul plasma and that’s well below the 1K price point you mentioned.