Rapid diagnosis of disease states using less invasive, safer, and more clinically acceptable approaches than presently employed is a crucial direction for the field of medicine. While MS-based proteomics approaches have attempted to meet these objectives, challenges such as the enormous dynamic range of protein concentrations in clinically relevant biofluid samples coupled with the need to address human biodiversity have slowed their employment. Herein, we report on the use of a new instrumental platform that addresses these challenges by coupling technical advances in rapid gas phase multiplexed ion mobility spectrometry separations with liquid chromatography and MS to dramatically increase measurement sensitivity and throughput, further enabling future high throughput To date pre-clinical and clinical applications of MS-based proteomic techniques analyzing complex biofluids have fallen short of expectations, largely due to deficiencies in both analytical sensitivity and throughput. These deficiencies result in measurements typically failing to confidently detect and quantify proteins at moderate to low concentrations, or not providing sufficient sample analysis throughput for statistical relevance. Targeted MS analyses with higher sensitivity are currently utilized to address these shortcomings (1, 2); however, these studies often only analyze a small list of proteins identified as biologically significant. While targeted MS measurements are increasingly common in clinical applications (3, 4), the limited number of proteins they examine does not necessarily reflect the biodiversity across a population, making broad untargeted measurements essential in developing individual disease metrics for diagnosis (5). As the future of medicine proceeds toward a personal profiling approach (6, 7), the potential for robust high throughput clinical measurements based upon MS is highly attractive, though only if its deficiencies can be addressed.
MSAn initial step in attaining broad untargeted measurements that increasingly retain the benefits of targeted analyses exploits technological advances such as faster separations, more effective ion sources, detectors with greater dynamic range, and MS measurements with both higher resolution and accuracy. Advanced liquid-phase separations have already