The human proteome – a scientific opportunity for transforming diagnostics, therapeutics, and healthcare

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) workshop was convened in Bethesda, MD on September 26–27, 2011, with representative scientific leaders in the field of proteomics and its applications to clinical settings. The main purpose of this workshop was to articulate ways in which the biomedical research community can capitalize on recent technology advances and synergize with ongoing efforts to advance the field of human proteomics.Proteins are the major components of biological networks and molecular machines, and proteins are the targets for the large majority of drugs available today. Participants in this Workshop recognized that a deeper knowledge of the human proteome could help fill the gap between genomes and phenotypes, transform the way we develop diagnostics and therapeutics, and thereby enhance overall biomedical research and future healthcare. The Human Genome Project and its many follow-on initiatives, including the HapMap and ENCODE, together with advances in protein sciences, have provided a foundation for proteomic technologies and informatics resources. Several major initiatives are already moving toward deep characterization of the human proteome, including the antibody-based Human Protein Atlas, the NIH Common Fund Protein Capture Reagents, the mass spectrometry-based Peptide Atlas and Selected Reaction Monitoring (SRM) Atlas, and the Human Proteome Project organized by the Human Proteome Organization. Several leading laboratories have demonstrated that about 10,000 protein products, of the about 20,000 protein-coding human genes, can be identified and quantified in a single experimental specimen; this figure may represent nearly the complete complement of proteins actually expressed in a single cell type. In yeast the complete expressed proteome has been identified. Even though a more comprehensive characterization of the dynamic aspect of the proteome will require further technology development, it is a disruptive concept that almost all of the prim