Jennifer Van Eyk
Professor, Advanced Clinical Biosystems Research Institute; Director, Precision Biomarker Laboratories; Founder and Director, Smidt Heart Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, USA
The decade’s most important development?Proteomics! The power of proteomic approaches is that they bring the best of both hypothesis-driven and hypothesis-generation research together. Proteomics technologies allow you to ask key questions, but the data provides a larger set of information about the cell, tissue or body fluid. Although one can focus on specific proteins or pathways, it is impossible to ignore the broader system responses. This ensures that one does not try to fit the data into a preconceived box, but instead pushes one to contemplate the remarkable complexity of biology and how little we still know.
Biggest challenge facing the field? The infrastructure and cost effectiveness of moving candidate biomarkers into clinical applications is, in my view, the biggest hurdle for the future applications to medicine.
Missing from the toolbox?Without cell and organ specificity proteome to cell and organ specific function (and yes, you can add in structure), we will not be able to move our global understanding to the complexity of systems.
