Shaping the future of precision medicine: plasma proteomics to uncover insights in thrombosis

Advances in various proteomics technologies, especially high-throughput and reproducibility, have enabled the systematic exploration of the circulating thrombosis proteome. This includes dissecting biological systems and pathways imperative to thrombosis, such as platelet activation, coagulation cascade, complement system, and endothelial cells. These insights strengthen our understanding of the cause and effect of thrombosis and improve precision medicine by identifying better biomarkers and biomarker panels, which may aid clinicians in decision-making in venous thromboembolism (VTE) and other thrombotic patients. This progress has the potential to reduce thrombosis-related morbidity and mortality, ultimately improving patient quality of life.
This review highlights recent advances and applications of mass spectrometry and affinity-based proteomics in thrombosis over the past three years (2022–2024), focusing on the thrombotic proteome signature related to VTE.
Plasma proteomics, predominantly driven by mass spectrometry and affinity-based proteomics, has shown promise in identifying novel disease biomarkers and pathways. With the recent advances in the field, proteomics holds the potential to revolutionize precision medicine. As thrombosis is an intravascular disease, analysis of the blood proteome can capture environmental, genetic, and epigenetic contributors to risk variation in thrombosis, revealing novel protein biomarkers for diagnosis and risk prediction and new biological pathways.