The Increasing Role of Mass Spectrometry in Quantitative Clinical Proteomics

Abstract

Protein biomarker research has been burgeoning over the last decade because of the tremendous potential for impact in the clinic. Biomarkers are either in current use or envisioned for virtually every area of medicine, including risk stratification of the population, early diagnosis of disease (1), predictors of therapeutic response, pharmacodynamic markers for determining the dose and schedule of therapy (2), monitoring for the recurrence of disease, and surrogate end points for use in early clinical trials (3). Despite the ability of “omics” technologies to generate long lists of candidate markers, however, few new biomarkers have been introduced for clinical use in recent years (4). This state of affairs is due in large part to the lack of efficient technologies for verification and validation of these long lists of candidate markers (5). This key piece of technology must be able to make reliable and affordable measurements of proteins in large numbers of samples with moderate to high throughput (6). In short, we need a versatile way to build quantitative assays for any protein of interest without a …