264 Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine, 2011, 9, 264-285 1875-6913/11 $58.00+.00 © 2011 Bentham Science Publishers Expert Review Article Nanotechniques and Proteomics: An Integrated Platform for Diagnostics, Targeted Therapeutics and Personalized Medicine Sandipan Ray 1,# , Sayantan Ray 2,# , Renisa D’souza 1 and Sanjeeva Srivastava 1, * 1 Wadhwani Research Center for Biosciences and Bioengineering, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India; 2 Department of Medicine, Medical College, Kolkata 88, College Street, Kolkata 700073, India Abstract: Proteomics, the study of entire compendium of proteins encoded by a genome, is now established as a leading technological platform for numerous areas of clinical research in personalized medicine: understanding of disease pathogenesis, detection of disease specific biomarkers and identification of novel drug and vaccine targets, to name a few. The successful integration of nanotechnology with proteomics has introduced a novel hybrid analytical platform known as “nanoproteomics”. Recent advances in the field of nanoproteomics have introduced nano-based approaches into personalized medicine and targeted therapeutics. Amongst the miscellaneous promising candidates, quantum particles, carbon nanotubes and nanowires, nanoscopic gold particles are promising for diagnostic and therapeutic applications due to their high sensitivity, versatile dynamic range, real-time monitoring power, multiplexing and high-throughput capability. Personalized medicine and targeted therapeutics are rapidly advancing frontiers of healthcare that is informed by the individual person’s unique clinical, genetic, genomic, proteomic and environmental information. This paper synthesizes the promising applications of nanoproteomic technologies in context of personalized medicine and molecular therapeutics as well as its impacts on clinical research. Finally, we share our recent experience in employing nanoproteomics technology platforms in India. We provide an outlook of why proteomics-based approaches might offer unique and complementary advantages in personalized medicine R&D that has hitherto relied to a large extent on genomics technology platforms. We conclude that genomics and nanoproteomics, when used in combination, can be a powerful approach that can propel personalized healthcare from the discovery lab to clinic and global public health practice. Keywords: Diagnostics, disease biomarker, nanotechnology, nanotubes and nanowires, personalized medicine, proteomics, quantum dots, targeted therapeutics. 1. INTRODUCTION The nascent but rapidly growing field of personalized medicine is amongst the most promising areas of clinical research, which deals with the individual person’s unique clinical, genetic, genomic, proteomic and environmental information [1, 2]. These factors are different for every person, making the nature of disease, its onset, its course, and how it might respond to drugs or other interventions as unique as the people who have them. Personalized medicine aims to provide the molecular understanding of a disease to optimize preventive healthcare strategies and drug therapies while people are still healthy or at a very early stage of disease [1]. The successful completion of human genome project has accelerated the development of a diverse set of novel “omics” technological platforms, which are extremely infor- mative for disease diagnosis and management. Availability of the genome sequence of different organisms has successfully *Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai 400076, India; Tel: +91-22-2576-7779; Fax: +91-22-2572-3480; E-mail: sanjeeva@iitb.ac.in # These authors made an equal contribution. accelerated the pace of understanding very dynamic proteome, and correlating genomic data with vast array of protein information [3]. Nanotechnology is the use and manipulation of materials that exhibit unique properties due to their ultra-small size (1 to 100 nanometers) [4]. The successful amalgamation of nanotechnology with proteomics has established a novel analytical platform known as “nanoproteomics”, which has steadily been growing over the recent years and importantly, has helped in sensitive detection of low abundance clinically relevant proteins in shorter time [3, 5]. Proteomics seeks to understand the role of proteins in the wider biological context and provides key for understanding health and disease because proteins provide direct information on physiological functions as compared to genes. Correlation of genomic information with the protein that is produced, for example, through analysis of cells under normal versus altered states, is made possible by proteomics. Exploration of the proteome is radically changing the aims and strategies of biomedical and pharmaceutical applications [6]. Understanding the role of proteins, various pathways and interaction networks will create enormous clinical