Nature communications Paper

Immunodiagnostic plasma amino acid residue biomarkers detect cancer early and predict treatment response

Rather than profiling thousands of individual plasma proteins, we reimagined the plasma proteome as a mixture of amino acid “components.” We identified residues whose abundance shifts markedly during tumour-elicited immune activation.

Each residue is tagged in parallel with a fluorogenic probe that becomes fluorescent only upon covalent reaction. This ensures specificity and eliminates background noise from unreacted dye.

A trained classifier then distinguishes cancer-associated immunosurveillance patterns with high accuracy.