Pharmacoproteomics is a rapidly advancing field in which the techniques of proteomics are applied to develop pharmaceutical agents. 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.