Pastel BioScience has made a significant breakthrough with the development of its unique human biomarker discovery platform, InVenio™, that will enable pharmaceutical companies to unlock the potential of recent developments in the field of proteomics .

It was initially believed that almost all of the information required to be known about a cell, tissue or organism could be inferred from the use of genomics. However, with the advent of proteomics, it is now realised that it is necessary to identify multiple protein molecules within a cell in order to provide direct, and not inferred, information on the state of cellular processes within a cell, tissue or organism.  This, in turn, will enable scientists to identify differences in protein expression patterns that occur between a normal/healthy cell or tissue and a diseased/altered cell or tissue which can then be used as biomarkers. Biomarkers are playing an increasingly important role in the drug discovery process and in diagnostics. They offer the potential to provide more detailed and accurate information about a particular disease, its stage of development, aggressiveness, response to drug treatment, and both short and long term prognosis than can be achieved through the use of single protein or gene biomarkers.

Thus proteomics requires technologies to identify particular proteins within a clinical sample as a detectable and measurable biomarker. Current technologies are only able to identify a small proportion of the total number of proteins in the human body and to achieve this can take many months. Industry insiders estimate that, using current technologies it may take until 2050 before there is a simple method for rapidly identifying the vast majority of the human proteins in a clinical sample.