Implementing a pan-Canadian standardized mass spectrometry-based proteomics approach for the analysis of clinical cancer samples: validation using archived breast cancer specimens for biomarker discovery

If your body were a factory line, DNA would be the blueprint, containing all the instructions needed to build and maintain it. Downstream you would find RNA, which acts as the factory supervisor, taking instructions from DNA and guiding the production process. Finally, you get to the workers – proteins – which actually build structures and perform specific tasks based on the instructions they receive.

Current precision oncology approaches mostly profile the two up-stream players – DNA and RNA – in search of alterations that can be targeted through new or existing therapies. Yet, while these therapies are chosen based on changes to DNA and RNA, they usually actually work by disrupting the function of proteins, which are, after all, the primary agents of disease.

In this context, being able to map the proteins that cause cancer in each individual and find ways to target them more specifically emerges as a promising way to personalize cancer treatments. However, a lack of standardized methods to profile the proteome has limited our ability to effectively do so.

That is why a team of pan-Canadian researchers will use new funding from the Terry Fox Research Institute and the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network to develop a standardized approach that uses mass spectrometry to measure thousands of proteins in individual patient samples, getting us one step closer to being able to target them for precision oncology treatments.