The era of proteomics has arrived: technology that analyzes proteins in record time brings personalized medicine closer

The era of proteomics has arrived. Kyrenia infographics.

Medical treatments are increasingly tailored to patients’ genetic makeup as more and more is known about the relationship between genes and disease. Now medicine is preparing to take advantage of another excellent source of information about the functioning of the body: proteomics.

Proteomics analyzes the proteins present in cells and tissues at a given point in time. Traditionally it has been a research discipline, but the development of more sensitive and faster equipment is transforming proteomics into a source of information that is also useful for patient care.

One of these new proteomics devices, the Orbitrap ASTRAL mass spectrometer, has just come into operation at the National Center for Cancer Research (CNIO). “This is another step towards personalized and precision medicine,” he explains. Martha Isasa

Head of the Proteomics Department at CNIO.

It’s a much more sensitive and fast device than previous ones and allows for “large-scale proteomics,” Isasa says. And this ability to analyze more and better paves the way for the information provided by proteomics to reach the clinic.

For example, proteomics “makes it possible to follow patients from the moment of diagnosis to know how they respond to treatment. And it will be possible to understand why the same therapy cures some patients and not others,” adds Isasa.

“The Next Great Revolution”

Squirrels are ours bricks and our nanomachines, the biomolecules that give structure to the body and make everything work. Antibodies, hormones, neurotransmitters are proteins; raw materials of bone, connective or muscle tissue; molecular targets that drugs act on… There are a million different proteins in the human body, and studying them provides key information for medicine.

“Proteomics is the next big revolution,” says Isasa. The first was genomics. ten years ago read (or said technically subsequence) Genome extracting information from genes has been a complex and expensive process, but advances in sequencing equipment have made the process almost routine. Proteomics is currently undergoing a technological leap.

CNIO’s proteomics division’s new ASTRAL orbital trap “represents an exponential change,” says Isasa. “Previously, to get 10,000 quantified proteins, we needed almost two days of instrumentation time; Now we do it in an hour.”

This type of equipment brings proteomics closer to hospitals, “as a new tool for understanding what is happening in the body and thus identifying diseases or finding treatments.” Proteomics will become a key tool in the clinic,” says the CNIO researcher.

From genome to proteome: a new level

Complete proteome a person is complex not only because he has many different proteins; also because the amount of proteins present in the body at any given time is constantly changing.

“Some proteins are produced and perform their function in minutes, then the cell breaks them down and recycles their components. Others last several days. There may be thousands of proteins in a cell at any given time, but they will change radically depending on needs throughout the day,” explains Isasa.

The body’s orders to make proteins come from genes, in the DNA molecule in the nucleus of every cell. For decades it was believed that each gene was responsible for the production of one protein, but a few years ago a mystery was revealed: there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome, but there are a million different proteins in our body.

“The same gene can give rise to many different proteins.”

How to combine numbers? After initial confusion, it was discovered that the genome is only the first level of complexity in the code that describes an organism. The information recorded in genes is not enough to build a person; The way information is converted into proteins adds another layer of complexity that also needs to be deciphered.

“We now know that the same gene can give rise to many different proteins,” explains Isasa. Moreover, “each of these proteins undergoes chemical modifications after being madeand these changes are called post-translational modifications “They determine the function and activity of the protein at any given moment.”

Why proteomics is useful in medicine

lThe information contained in genes is not enough to understand what is happening in the cell. “That’s what proteomics tells us,” adds Isasa, who studies what and how many proteins are in a sample, whether they have changed and/or whether they interact with other proteins.

Protein modifications and interactions change in the presence of diseases or in response to treatment. Proteins interact with each other according to their shape, connecting to each other like pieces of 3D Tetris. For example, a drug is only effective if it matches the target protein.

This is why proteomics is important for screening and discovering new drug targets, as well as understanding the mechanism of drug action or resistance. “The applications in both basic and translational biology are endless,” says Isasa. And he makes a comparison: “By decoding the human genome, we have discovered the alphabet of life; Now, thanks to proteomics, we can begin to understand the whole language.”

Return to news