The NCI's Clinical Proteomic Technology for Cancer Initiative (CPTC) has been actively overcoming the technological barriers to advance the science of proteomics.
The full proteomics analysis of a small tumor sample (similar in mass to a few grains of rice) produces well over 500 megabytes of unprocessed "raw" data when analyzed on a mass spectrometer (MS). Thus, for every proteomics experiment there is a vast amount of raw data that must be analyzed and interrogated in order to extract biological information.
Whether in determining if a women is pregnant or not by measuring human chorionic gonadotropin or determining whether someone is HIV positive, antibodies and other affinity reagents play a key role both in diagnostic decision making and advancing the research field.
Regulatory advances in proteomics will be taking center stage at a Symposia scheduled to occur at the 2011 American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Annual Meeting. The symposium entitled "Enabling Translational Proteomics with NCI's Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer" is scheduled for July 25, 2011 at AACC's annual Meeting.
Is there a specific advance that must be made in order to advance our understanding of cancer and cancer control?
Despite great strides in proteomics and the growing number of articles citing the discovery of potential biomarkers, the actual rate of introduction of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved protein analytes has been relatively unchanged over the past 10 years. One of reasons for the lack of new protein-based biomarkers approved has been a lack of information and understanding by the proteomics research community to the regulatory process used by the FDA.
Determining the relationship between the function of an isolated protein and the function of that protein in a complex cellular environment is a significant analytical endeavor. Due to the time and cost associated with developing an enzyme linked immunoassay (ELISA), mass spectrometric approaches are playing an increasingly large role in protein analyses.