Antibody microarrays enable the parallel detection of multiple proteins in low sample volumes. Continued improvements in the technology have increased the usefulness of the methods for basic and applied biological research, including cancer research. Several different versions of antibody microarray formats and methods have been developed, each with various advantages, disadvantages, and optimal applications. This review looks at the applications of those various technologies to cancer research.The experimental features of microarrays have advantages for cancer research. The low sample volumes result in the consumption of small amounts of both precious clinical samples and expensive antibodies. The assays can be run efficiently in parallel, enabling studies on the large populations of samples that are necessary for marker discovery and validation. In addition, the assays can have good reproducibility, high sensitivity, and quantitative accuracy over large concentration ranges (1). Antibody and protein arrays are complementary and in some aspects preferable to separation-based and mass spectrometry-based technologies. Reproducibility and throughput can be higher, and the identities of the measured proteins are known or can be readily characterized.Therefore, specific hypotheses regarding the nature of molecular alterations can be tested and generated, and the observed measurements can be biologically interpreted.A common application of antibody arrays in cancer research is the identification of biomarkers or molecules that are potentially valuable for diagnosis or prognosis or as surrogate markers of drug response. The multiplex capability of antibody arrays allows the efficient screening of many marker candidates to reveal associations between proteins and disease states or experimental conditions. Multiplexed measurements also allow the evaluation of the use of multiple markers in combination. The use of combinations of proteins for disease diagnostics may produce fewer false positive and false negative results as compared with tests based on single proteins. Antibody microarrays, by increasing the number of proteins that can be conveniently measured in clinical samples, could more significantly take advantage of the benefit of using combined markers in diagnostics. Other example applications of antibody microarrays in cancer research are to evaluate the coordinated changes of members of signaling pathways or to measure changes in expression levels of a class of proteins, such as angiogenesis factors.This review covers the major applications of antibody array technologies to cancer research. The first section gives an overview of the main features of the various antibody microarray technologies. Details of the technologies will not be covered extensively; reviews with a greater technological focus are available elsewhere (2-6). The next two sections cover applications to cancer research and are divided according to the type of sample analyzed: fluids (second section) and cells (third section). The final section...