Pharmacoproteomics is a rapidly advancing field in which the techniques of proteomics are applied to develop pharmaceutical agents. The word itself was coined only in 1997.
However, this branch of study plays a major role in personalized medicine. The word proteomics itself means the study of proteomes, a proteome being the full complement of proteins expressed by an organism or tissue under specified conditions at a specified time.
Proteomes are therefore dynamic, and a given human may have a proteome with as many as two million proteins. The use of this full set of proteins to study the effect of disease or drugs can substitute for much more complex assays in pharmacodynamics at a lower cost in time, financial output, and clinical risk.
The importance of studying protein modulation by pharmaceutical agents is that while pharmacogenomics provides information about how genetics affects drug efficacy and response, it is the gene expression in terms of protein synthesis that actually reflects the physiological effect of the drug.
For instance, there are about 19,000 genes encoding proteins in humans, but millions of proteins, because of the immense diversity in posttranslational modifications that can occur to change the functional expression of any given gene. Proteomics is also a dynamic study, unlike genomics which is more in the nature of an instantaneous snapshot.
Thus, the addition of pharmacoproteomics is a great step forward in developing a true understanding of how biological systems actually work under genetic constraints imposed by certain genetic associations.