Biomarker discovery by proteomics: challenges not only for the analytical chemist.

This forum article outlines some of the major challenges in present day biomarker discovery research. Notably the dilemma of reaching sufficient concentration sensitivity versus the required analysis time per sample is highlighted using a model calculation. A number of possible developments and recent research findings are considered to show possible ways out of this dilemma. Finally, the challenge of processing large, megavariate datasets prior to statistical analysis is presented.