Making the cut: untangling clinical protein biomarker discovery and validation

“...naive as it may sound, we believe that the unbiased, large-scale approach enabled by our SOMAmer technology offers tremendous potential for the rapid identification and validation of clinically useful biomarkers across a range of diseases.” “Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.” Jean Cocteau Progress in finding valid proteomic biomarkers of disease and translating them to clinical practice has been slow, costly and largely disappointing [1]. Many reasons for this tortuous effort’s failures have been cited, but there are two major and seemingly intractable problems: human biology is surprisingly and...