Researchers believe that clinical proteomics will bring about improved disease diagnosis, particularly for cancer and infectious disease, says this market report
Clinical proteomics stands to revolutionise the huge clinical testing market.
Although bringing this discipline to the bedside is years away, cancer and infectious disease are two conditions believed to be the best candidates for prognostic or diagnostic assays based on protein-profiling.
These findings were recently published by BioInformatics in 'Clinical proteomics: A first-glance market report'.
Based on a detailed survey, this 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, over 40% of those scientists performing protein-profiling do so with the objective of identifying protein expression patterns associated with diseases.
In contrast to existing diagnostic assays, which examine protein biomarkers one at a time, clinical proteomics is based on creating protein profiles that simultaneously detect hundreds or even thousands of proteins in a single assay enabling much higher levels of prognostic or diagnostic accuracy.
The future of clinical proteomics appears to lie in two technologies: mass spectrometry and protein arrays/chips.
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, as exemplified by Ciphergen's ProteinChip system.
Protein arrays/chips are used by 23% of the respondents for protein-profiling.
Of these scientists, nearly half obtain their arrays from a commercial supplier, with Ciphergen and BD Biosciences Clontech cited as the leading vendors.
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 variety 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.
"I believe that the effectiveness of clinical proteomics will hinge on two technological components: rapid, multiplex protein detection assays and data analysis systems to assimilate vast amounts of protein expression data from healthy and diseased individuals into clinically relevant datasets," professes Robin Rothrock, director of market research at BioInformatics.
As these and other challenges are addressed, the opportunities for clinical proteomics will likely 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.
Despite the fact that relatively few researchers are employing protein arrays in their disease studies, understanding the current experiences of today's visionaries and monitoring how their needs change over time is key for suppliers hoping to dominate this new, revolutionary technology.
Therefore, this First-Glance market report is designed to meet the needs of strategic planners for time-sensitive, exploratory research as well as delivering data right from the market's visionaries to their counterparts in industry-quickly and at an affordable cost.
