Ovarian cancer proteomics: Many technologies one goal

The last decade has seen major changes in the technologies used to identify markers for diagnosing cancer. This review focuses on recent developments on the evolving field of biomarker discovery, and validation techniques using proteomics platforms for ovarian cancer. It is possible now to diagnose various disease conditions using microliter quantities of body fluids. Currently the major developments were made in three distinct areas: (i) protein profiling, (ii) high-throughput validation techniques, and (iii) solid and liquid phase protein microarray platforms for analyzing candidate markers across subclasses and stages of cancers. The recent addition to the long list of technologies is metabolomics using metabolite profiling and informatics-based filtering of information for biomarker discovery of ovarian cancer. Emerging technologies need to address ways to eliminate the limitations posed by the complex dynamic nature of body fluids as well as ways to enrich low-abundance tumor markers if they were to become a successful biomarker discovery tool. These new technologies hold significant promise in identifying more robust markers for ovarian cancer. Since the prevalence of this disease in the population is low, the test must have a high specificity.