"A urine or blood test will make it possible to detect diseases in primary care consultations. The next twenty years are crucial to deepen the study of proteins and to be able to implement personalized medicine", say professors Peter Roepstorff and Michael Karas, experts in research proteomics, at the University of Navarra. Together with Franz Hillemkamp, they were honored for their contribution to specialization program at the congress of the Spanish Proteomics Society, organized in coordination with research center Médica Aplicada (CIMA).

Proteomics is a study tool that focuses on the analysis of proteins as a whole or proteome. It offers two main contributions for its application in clinical activity: early identification of biomarkers that allow us to understand the mechanisms behind a disease and, as a consequence, to achieve specific treatments or determine new therapeutic targets. "We currently have some biomarkers and will probably identify more, but it is a long and costly process. At the moment we know that combining different biomarkers offers more specificity than analyzing them in isolation," says Michael Karas.

According to Peter Roepstorff, oncology is one of the fields in which proteomics will offer the first therapeutic applications. "These biomarkers will probably enable us to identify cancer cells and determine the effect of treatment. In any case, the research in proteomics is just beginning and we don't know when we will be able to develop clinical analyses through this knowledge."

During their visit to the University of Navarra, the experts affirmed that the combination of genomics and proteomics will make it possible to decide on more specific treatments. "Much of the information we can obtain to understand Genetics will come from research proteomics."

The challenge of interpretation

One of the challenges at research proteomics is the interpretation of data. "We generate a lot of information but we have to go deeper into its biological, statistical, etc. meaning. At the qualitative level we get a lot of knowledge, but we don't know if it is cause or effect, or what the level of alteration is. Currently, a lot of effort is being invested in quantitative proteomics and, as we can see at congress, many advances are being made in this field," says Dr. Juan Calvete, president of the Spanish Proteomics Society.