Selection of optimal protein sets as serological tumor marker signatures

Currently, various potential tumor markers have been proposed for clinical practice. Although some of them are successfully used in diagnostics, and treatment, none of them fully meets the needs of oncology. Therefore, the search for new markers continues. In this context much attention is paid to multiomics technologies such as genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. However, since tumor biomarkers are mainly proteins, proteomics plays a central role in the search of tumor markers. Blood is the most popular source of information about a patient's health and therefore the search is focused on plasma/serum proteins In order to increase the sensitivity and specificity of the analysis, a very promising approach is to assess the levels of certain sets of relevant proteins rather than individual proteins and this review is devoted to analysis of this problem.