What are the approaches used in the development of clinical proteomics?
The goal of clinical proteomics is to develop proteomics technology for the benefit of patient care. This new research technology is now being used in clinical research studies ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease and organ transplants (3). Researchers are searching for proteins that can be used as early biomarkers of disease, or that may predict response to therapy or the likelihood of relapse after treatment in blood, urine, or diseased tissue. (4, 5). Ovarian Cancer Ovarian cancer is a major focus of early biomarker discovery because it is usually diagnosed at an advanced stage with a five-year survival rate of about 20 percent. To evaluate the potential use of proteomics as a diagnostic tool, a group of researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Md., collected serum from 50 ovarian cancer patients and 50 controls and used a computer algorithm to search for the protein patterns that distinguished cancer from non-cancer. When they tested this pattern w
