Clinical applications of proteomics: Proteomic pattern diagnostics

Clinical proteomics is an exciting new subdiscipline of proteomics that involves bedside application of proteomic technologies. A new and potentially revolutionary technology and approach for early disease detection, surveillance, and monitoring is proteomic pattern diagnostics. Using this approach, high throughput mass spectrometry generates a proteomic fingerprint of a given body fluid, such as serum or nipple fluid aspirants (NAF), in less than 30 s. This information archive is then used by new types of bioinformatic pattern recognition algorithms to identify patterns of protein changes that can discriminate cancer from healthy and unaffected individuals. This entire process can take place in less than a minute and requires only a droplet of blood, NAF, or ductal lavage washings. The new concept that is introduced by this platform is that the underlying identities of the proteins that comprise the patterns are not known and do not need to be known; the pattern itself becomes the diagnostic.