New era of integrated cancer biomarker discovery using reverse-phase protein arrays

The ultimate goal of cancer biomarker discovery is to use individual patient-derived biochemical information to improve patients' outcomes. A recent increase in the spectrum of therapeutic options for cancer requires improved approaches to identify patients likely to benefit from them. The ability to elucidate biological characteristics of tumors and to understand both inter and intra tumoral heterogeneity using large-scale data sets generated from both model systems and patient samples provides a unique opportunity to identify useful cancer biomarkers. Since the reverse-phase protein array (RPPA) was introduced in the early 2000s, it has played a central role in a wide range of uses including cancer biology, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic target evaluation. The quantitative output from RPPAs is readily combined with that from other “omics” platforms using a variety of information-intensive approaches at the molecular and population levels. A vast and rapidly growing body of related proteomic is now publicly available, and leading researchers in the field organized the Global RPPA Society in 2011 to facilitate the sharing of resources and data. The RPPA community is embracing the new paradigm of data sharing, which is designed to accelerate the discovery of cancer biomarkers and implementation of them in cancer patient management.