J-C Liao, PhD, founder and CEO
At Syncell, we were delighted to see that Nature Methods named spatial proteomics the “Method of the Year” for 2024. We are even more delighted that our Microscoop® technology improves on the different techniques mentioned in the journal!
Proteomics is truly becoming a hot trend in life science, especially in accelerating biomarker discovery and drug development. About 95 percent of current or developing drugs target proteins. If you need to treat a patient, you need to aim at proteins. If you need to understand the details of a disease—you need to know the proteins behind it.
Nature Methods chose spatial proteomics because “we were excited by the recent development of (deep visual proteomics) DVP and other methods seeking new ways to explore the spatial proteome in greater depth and breadth. In addition, we were inspired by the current efforts of large consortia such as the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) and the Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN) not only to create large atlases of data for the scientific and medical communities, but also to develop tools to analyze, visualize and mine the data to go beyond the pretty pictures and deeper into biological discovery.”
The editors of Nature Methods, and we here at Syncell, share an enthusiasm for what the future of spatial proteomics holds. Here, we are not as involved in mapping and atlasing (though no doubt our customers will be), and are more focused on discovery than profiling known proteins. Facilitating the entire pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry to accelerate the identification of novel biomarkers and druggable protein targets for diseases such as Parkinson’s, triple negative breast cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and many others is our mission. The Microscoop® platform can reveal the distribution of protein constituents at a subcellular level, in cells, cell colonies or tissues. It gives us protein candidates that may be responsible for the malignance of a given cancer, insights into the causes of metabolic disorders, and even how memories are stored in the brain.
Techniques, including those that form the basis of Microscoop®, are only improving. High-speed automation is continuously evolving with extensive development in the semiconductor industry, and microscopy is benefiting from increasing resolution. And while mass spectrometry(MS) has been around a long time, its capabilities have been drastically advanced—new MS technologies can now achieve deep proteomics using sub-ng of sample, 100 times better than what were normal sample amounts using previously standard MS platforms.
I developed the Microscoop® technology because I was seeking a technological advance in resolution over laser microdissection. When I was a faculty member at Columbia University, I was looking to characterize the proteins in different types of primary cilia, which are only 0.25 microns by ~5 micron in size. These were too difficult to cut with laser microdissection. Now, we believe our method, using microscopy-guided automated photo-biotinylation to label molecules, and coupling that with MS to identify and characterize our captured proteins, has improved resolution to a level where high-resolution purification of site-specific disease proteins from patient tissue samples finally becomes routinely feasible.
Spatial proteomics can be applied to anything you can see and distinguish with your eyes. Pathologists usually can see specific image features of diverse diseases, and now with the advances in spatial proteomics, they can determine the protein constituents in situ and gain insights into what proteins can cause the diseases, ranging from cancer to fibrosis to heart disease to neurological disorders. Discovering new roles for proteins (and possibly even new proteins) will be useful for everyone working downstream, finding new biomarkers and new drug targets.
Currently, it is estimated that a human cell contains 20,000 protein-coding genes and possibly more than 1,000,000 proteoforms. But when we conduct MS studies now, we end up tossing a significant amount of our data, because we just don’t know what they represent from the existing database. Microscoop® technology, I believe, will soon allow us to discover what new proteins are in cells, looking for new protein constituents and their roles.
I share Nature Methods’ enthusiasm and focus on the newly evolving field of spatial proteomics and look forward to what we will see in the future, inside and outside the cell.
