Proteomic Assay to Predict Health, Wellness, and Disease

The ever-changing state of the proteins in your body is arguably one of the most important indicators of health and disease, but, to date, measurements have only been possible on individual proteins or small multiplexes. SomaLogic has commercialized a rapid proteomic scanning platform (SOMAScan) that quantifies over 5000 proteins in blood or urine spanning 7 orders of magnitude in concentration, with sub-pM limits of detection. The assay relies on SOMAmers (Slow-Offrate-Modified AptaMERs), short pieces of DNA with additional chemical diversity that are selected to bind tightly to a specific protein. Rather than directly measure the proteins themselves, the fundamental principle underlying the assay is to turn a protein counting problem into a DNA counting problem. DNA has a few important differences relative to proteins that make the DNA counting problem much more tractable, including that a chemical complement exists, and that DNA can be amplified and sequenced inexpensively. To date, we have measured over 100,000 human samples. Applying machine learning to the large resulting databases has led to a rapidly growing number of heath measures, including diabetes and cardiovascular risk, with the ultimate goal of providing hundreds of results from a single liquid sample. I will briefly review the physics underlying the current assay and highlight a few of the health measurements. I will also briefly address some thoughts on future device physics to move the assay from the lab to the home.