Recent developments in proteomics to analyze thousands of blood proteins have enabled deeper insights into human biology [1,2]. Despite the technological leap and influx of data to amplify our molecular descriptions of health and disease, distinguishing between observational or causal findings can remain challenging. Factors contributing to heterogeneity are sample-specific phenotypes, pre-analytical factors, technologycentric data, and donor conditions during sampling.
The presentation will include projects that study circulating proteins in various human phenotypes, health states, disease risks, or the molecular effects of drug usage. A common aspect across these endeavors is the ongoing necessity to acquire a more thorough understanding of the dynamic architecture of the circulating proteome. Regardless of the technological approach, it's imperative to address potential preanalytical biases, consider influential clinical traits, and recognize alterations common to several diseases. Assuring experimental reliability necessitates the adoption of analytical validation schemes and the integration of diverse data types.
Since the early onset of the pandemic, and to enable an actionable population-level study of the circulating proteome, we explored remote micro-sampling of blood as a viable tool for precision medicine [3]. Self-sampling has enabled studying exposures of the general public outside conventional hospital settings, and it demonstrated that executing deeper proteome profiling in a single droplet of blood offers new avenues for health and disease status monitoring [4].
In this talk, I will present our learnings and perspectives from utilizing state-of-the-art affinity proteomics techniques across different disease areas while exploring selfsampling. I will show examples of individual-specific proteomes obtained through longitudinal analyses [5,6], discuss data-driven approaches to reveal unforeseen phenotypes [7], and evaluate proteins for early disease detection [8].
Literature:
[1] Suhre et al., Nat Gen Rev, 2021; [2] Deutsch et al., J Prot Res. 2021; [3] Roxhed et al., Nat Comms, 2021; [4] Fredolini et al., unpublished; [5] Tebani et al. Nat Comms, 2020; [6] Dodig et al., EBioMed, 2020; [7] Thomas et al., Trans Oncol, 2022; [8] Mälarstig et al. Nat Comms, 2023.