Clinical proteomics: new trends for protein microarrays

Protein microarrays are an emerging class of nanotechnology for tracking many different proteins simultaneously. Much progress has been made for applications in basic sciences. Translation of these methods for the treatment of patients, however, is slow, because the realities in the clinic are rarely taken into account, and proteomic changes in cultured cell lines might not fully reflect human diseases due to the lack of the tissue microenvironment. In this review, we summarise current protein microarray approaches that are being developed for profiling tissues and histopathologically defined cell populations from cancer patients. We provide an overview of clinical applications for protein lysate microarrays and discuss the power of this technology for the discovery of disease markers for cancer diagnosis and individualised treatment.