Decision Tree for Protein Biomarker Selection for Clinical Applications

Abstract

Discovery of novel protein biomarkers for clinical applications is an active research field across a manifold of diseases. Despite some successes and progress, the biomarker development pipeline still frequently ends in failure as biomarker candidates cannot be validated or translated to immunoassays. Selection of strong disease biomarker candidates that further constitute suitable targets for antibody binding in immunoassays is thus important. This essential selection step can be supported and rationalized using bioinformatics tools such as protein databases. Here, I present a workflow in the form of decision trees to computationally investigate biomarker candidates and their available affinity reagents in depth. This analysis can identify the most promising biomarker candidates for assay development while minimal time and effort is required.