Beyond Genes: Re-Identifiability of Proteomic Data and Its Implications for Personalized Medicine

The increasing availability of high throughput proteomics data provides us with opportunities as well as posing new ethical challenges regarding data privacy and re-identifiability of participants. Moreover, the fact that proteomics represents a level between the genotype and the phenotype further exacerbates the situation, introducing dilemmas related to publicly available data, anonymization, ownership of information and incidental findings. In this paper, we try to differentiate proteomics from genomics data and cover the ethical challenges related to proteomics data sharing. Finally, we give an overview of the proposed solutions and the outlook for future studies.