Cardiovascular proteomics: implications for clinical applications.

Proteomics is fulfilling its potential and beginning to impact the diagnosis and therapy of cardiovascular disease. As de novo proteomics analysis gets more streamlined, and robust high-throughput methods are developed, more and more attention is being directed toward the field of cardiovascular serum and plasma biomarker discovery. To take cardiovascular proteomics from bench to bedside, great care must be taken to achieve reproducible results. Despite technical advances, however, the absolute number of clinical biomarkers thus far discovered by a proteomics approach is small. Although several factors contribute to this lack, one step is to build "translation teams" involving a close collaboration between researchers and clinicians.