For a while it looked as if proteomics' next frontier was the clinic, if one was to believe the hype surrounding a 2002 study from US Food and Drug Administration scientist Emanuel Petricoin III and National Cancer Institute scientist Lance Liotta. The pair and their team used mass spectrometry and pattern-recognition software to probe serum samples for ovarian cancer biomarkers. Their findings suggested that proteomic patterns – series of peaks in mass spectra representing unidentified peptides or low molecular-weight protein fragments – could be used to diagnose early ovarian cancer with surprising accuracy.
This was the hope in late 2003 when biotech startup Correlogic licensed Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp to market OvaCheck, a blood test for ovarian cancer based on the initially promising findings. But doubts about the validity of Petricoin's results and the robustness of serum proteomics as a tool for biomarker discovery quickly emerged: Keith Baggerly, a bioinformatician ...
