Abstract
Cancer remains one of the most complex and challenging diseases in
mankind. To address the need for a personalized treatment approach for
particularly complex tumor cases, molecular tumor boards (MTBs) have
been initiated. MTBs are interdisciplinary teams that perform in-depth
molecular diagnostics to cooperatively and interdisciplinarily advise on
the best therapeutic strategy. Current routine molecular diagnostics are
routinely performed on the transcriptomic and genomic levels, aiming for
the identification of tumor-driving mutations. However, these approaches
can only partially capture the actual phenotype as well as the molecular
key players of tumor growth and progression. Thus, direct investigation
of the expressed proteins and activated signaling pathways provide
complementary information on the tumor-driving molecular characteristics
of the tissue. Technological advancements in mass-spectrometry-based
proteomics enable the robust, rapid, and sensitive detection of
thousands of proteins in minimal sample amounts, paving the way for
clinical proteomics and the probing of oncogenic signaling activity.
Therefore, proteomics is currently being integrated into molecular
diagnostics within MTBs and holds promising potential in aiding tumor
classification and identifying personalized treatment strategies. This
review gives an introduction to MTBs and describes current
state-of-the-art clinical proteomics, its potential in precision
oncology, and highlights the benefits of multi-omic data integration.