Applications of proteomics in cancer – Round up September 2025
Tyler Ford
September 25, 2025
In this update to our Proteomics and cancer eBook, we focused on research leveraging proteoform analysis to advance our understanding of cancer. Proteoforms are largely untapped as sources of targets for novel cancer precision medicines and diagnostics. We look forward to working with members of the cancer research community to apply our single-molecule proteomics method, Iterative Mapping, to explore the proteomic landscape of cancer including its many proteoforms and thereby usher in a new wave of precision medicine.
Here, we provide a glimpse at the new sections of the eBook and encourage you to download the full eBook to learn more. We hope you enjoy these resources. Please reach out if you have any questions or would like to work with us to apply Iterative Mapping to your future work!
Read our preprint covering Iterative Mapping of tau proteoforms.
Proteoforms, metastasis and cancer therapy responses
It’s well-known that signaling is often drastically altered in cancer cells, but researchers rarely know how cancer mutations and treatments alter the proteoforms that determine signaling outcomes. Here, we highlight work from three studies leveraging proteomics to show proteoforms:
- Are diverse in cancer cells.
- Change during kinase inhibition and metastasis.
- Can have opposing abundance changes even when derived from the same protein.
Functional differences in the KRAS proteoform landscape
When you study proteins at the proteoform level, you see functional biology at work. This post highlights research from the Kelleher Lab revealing how a KRAS proteoform alters signaling. We also discuss how Iterative Mapping of proteoforms on the Nautilus Platform can advance this essential work.
Proteoforms and EGFR signaling
The literature is rife with evidence for the importance of proteoforms in a wide variety of biological functions. Yet, we’ve only recently started to conceptualize proteoforms as distinct biological entities and begun developing the technologies necessary for studying them at scale.
Here, we feature a distillation of 2010 work from Forest White’s Lab at MIT suggesting different patterns of modification on EGFR proteoforms may alter cancer growth.
Updated Proteomics and cancer eBook
We’ve included the blog posts summarized above and many more in our full Proteomics and cancer eBook.
Download the Proteomics and cancer eBook here.
If you have a favorite example of the power of proteomics in cancer research, please share it with us and we may include it in our next eBook update!
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