Early Pregnancy Screening for Complications of Pregnancy: Proteomic Profiling Approaches

Abstract

The keystone to improving health outcomes remains the timely and accurate diagnosis of the predisposition to, or early detection of, disease. Early detection of disease risk and onset is the first step in implementing efficacious treatment and improving patient outcome. (Figure 1). In the context of antenatal screening, the objective of proteomic approaches is to identify proteins and peptides that are informative of the risk of asymptomatic early pregnant women subsequently developing complications of pregnancy. That is, how the antecedents of complications of pregnancy alter the expression of the genome and how this is manifested as altered protein and peptide expression. Informative proteins and peptides identified may be used to develop classification models (e.g. multiple biomarker diagnostic