As per its mission statement, the HUPO congress allows researchers from the Americas, Asia/Oceania, and Europe to come together to discuss and showcase developments in proteomics research in the context of understanding human disease.
The congress took place virtually this year, and comprised a mix of education sessions, poster presentations, and industry seminars covering ‘hot topics’ in the proteomics field. Attendees could attend sessions on the contribution of proteomics to COVID-19 research, discover the latest technological advances in the proteomics field, as well as gain insight into how to better connect proteomics to the clinic with regards to therapeutics and proteomics-driven precision medicine.
Many of the talks given at these sessions spoke of the power of protein biomarkers and their use to better understand disease and develop better disease diagnostics and therapies. Attendees found out about advances made in the monitoring and prognosis of thyroid nodules and Alzheimer’s disease using protein biomarker signatures, or how protein signatures differed between hospitalized COVID-19 negative patients and those who were COVID-19 positive.
Applying the power of protein biomarkers to breast cancer
These themes, and more, were covered in an Olink-sponsored session where Dr. Anders Mälarstig of Pfizer discussed preliminary research using Olink® Explore 3072, the latest expansion of our Explore protein assay library.
Dr. Mälarstig and his team used Olink® Target panels, as well as Explore, to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the blood proteome in the KARMA cohort, a patient cohort of over 70 000 women diagnosed with breast cancer collected from four different Swedish hospitals from 2011 to present. Results from the Olink Target panels identified some protein biomarkers that have already been linked to breast cancer in previous research, as well as biomarker associations with breast cancer sub-types and degree of metastasis. The large volume of high-quality data obtained using Explore 3072 also looked extremely promising and once the in-depth analysis is completed, Dr. Mälarstig hopes to identify further novel protein biomarkers to better understand the biology of breast cancer and develop new treatments.
