Protein Microarrays for Cancer Diagnostics and Therapy

lung cancers [8, 9]. Even though cancer is in essence a ge-nomic disease, through different processes such as mu-tation, copy number variation, insertion, deletion and methylation, the resulting functional elements of cancers are proteins [10]. Therefore, the study of the cancer pro-teome is just as central as understanding the cancer ge-nome. The ultimate goal for researchers is to be able to diag-nose cancers early, make specific prognostic predictions and cure the patient of the disease. In each of these steps, proteins have played a large role. For example, many of the methods for early detection of cancers rely upon pro-tein markers, such as prostate-specific antigen for pros-tate cancer and cancer antigen 125 for ovarian cancer. Conversely, many of the small-molecule drugs or anti-bodies are specific inhibitors of proteins, such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Whether it is the finding of new bio-markers or developing new therapeutic drugs, it is impor-tant to understand, profile and target proteins, and can-cer proteomics allows the large-scale understanding of the whole complement of proteins in different cancer cells or in patients with cancer. Therefore, the role of can-cer proteomics cannot be underestimated. In this paper, the focus is on one of the most exciting technologies for cancer proteomics – protein microarray. This technology has allowed for critical understandin