Scientist article discussing some of the stuff you have been at for a while now (together with a few new company names...)
the-scientist.com
...Not all polypeptides of interest to the medical community are whole proteins. "The vast majority of diagnostic information [is] contained within protein fragments and peptides that all reside in this low-molecular-weight region of the proteome," Petricoin observes. "It's an archive that's entirely unexplored, because all past biomarker-based efforts utilized technology such as 2DE [two-dimensional gel electrophoresis] ... and all those previous technologies couldn't resolve the region of the [lower] proteome below, say, 10,000 Daltons."
Much of the lower proteome seems to be cleavage products, and "what we're likely looking at is the product of proteases... and other biological processes that seem to be tied to the disease development," says Semmes. He adds that, for many diseases like prostate cancer, "there's nothing left to see" in the larger proteome, which researchers have been mining with 2DE for 20 years....
...The FDA/NCI admits on its Web site that the original Ciphergen systems have "too low mass resolution and too high mass drift for our specific needs. We could not run the same sample on the same machine at a later date and have the spectra align correctly."5 Ciphergen's CEO concedes the point as well: "I think they're really good research machines at this point, but they're not at a stage where they're going to be robust enough to be put into a diagnostic setting easily," says Rich. He adds that the next generation of systems, due out around the end of the year, "will really be robust enough to be used in a reference laboratory setting and in an esoteric testing setting." |
