Proteomics is a not a word you are familiar with, but you will be. Proteomics is a fast-growing filed that looks for telltale proteins in a person’s blood to diagnose disease at a very early stage.

Diagnosis 2.0

By the time a doctor diagnoses you with cancer or a neurodegenerative disease, you may have been living with it for years—a troubling fact, given that early detection is the most important factor in successful treatment. Now, Power3 Medical Products, a biotech firm in Houston, Texas, has developed simple, low-cost blood tests for breast cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that will allow physicians to spot disease the moment it shows up in a patient’s body—years earlier than today’s most advanced technologies can catch it.

—

“There’s tremendous promise in proteomics,” says Lance Liotta, a proteomic scientist at George Mason University. “The early diagnosis and individualized therapy coming out of the science is going to change medicine.”