New way to label proteins could help track disease

A new method to study the proteins released by cells could lead to the development of new tools to track diseases including cancer. The method for finding new 'biomarker' proteins was developed by scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London. Biomarkers are highly valuable tools that allow doctors to study biology and disease. For example, they can help diagnose a disease from a blood or tissue sample, predict if a treatment will be effective in an individual, or see how much of a drug is reaching diseased cells. But finding these biomarkers is challenging. To help diagnose disease, scientists need to identify proteins that are uniquely made by diseased or cancerous cells but are not released by healthy cells. In their study, published today in Nature Communication s , the team developed a new method that identifies proteins released by a specific type of cell, even if the cells are in a complex environment with lots of other cell types.