Protein measurements provide invaluable information to the healthcare system, providing biomarkers that help to diagnose diseases, determine which patients are likely to benefit from a treatment, and tracking how well patients are responding. Discovering these critical biomarkers requires technologies that can initially measure thousands of proteins simultaneously, in order to find the few that matter for a particular test. While measuring thousands of proteins is technically possible, it is extraordinarily expensive; as a results, studies to identify these crucial biomarkers are limited by cost. Of note, there is a wealth of proteomics information in the UK databank, that can help identify the proteins that are most commonly present in the blood and most often associated with an individual’s health. We propose to apply the 80/20 rule to identify the 20% of proteins that capture 80% of biological information. Using this shortlist will enable future biomarker studies to dramatically reduce costs, therefore enabling more studies and the discovery of more biomarkers to improve the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases.
