A jaundiced patient with a mass near the pancreatic head may have cancer or a benign biliary stricture, and routine labs such as CRP, ALP, and GGT climb in both. Telling them apart often waits on imaging and biopsy. A team in Johannesburg and Pretoria asked whether plasma proteomics could do some of that work earlier. Writing in the Journal of Proteome Research, they enriched extracellular vesicles (EVs, the membrane-bound particles cells shed into blood) from 178 people and

Primary focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) is filed under non-immune kidney disease, yet biopsies often show C3 caught in sclerotic lesions. Does that complement signal matter for the patient? A September 2026 study in Frontiers in Immunology used multi-omics profiling of kidney tissue, pairing LC-MS/MS proteomics with public RNA-seq data, to map complement dysregulation and test whether glomerular deposits predict treatment response. In this single-center cohort, they

Deciding which fatty liver patients need treatment still comes down to a biopsy needle. At-risk metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), defined by an activity score of at least 4 with stage 2 or worse fibrosis, is the subgroup that drifts toward cirrhosis, and no blood test separates it cleanly from benign steatosis. A group at Ruijin Hospital went after that gap with liver transcriptomics, asking whether genes governing efferocytosis (the clearance of dying

About a third of atrial fibrillation (AF) patients relapse within a year of treatment, and no routine blood test reports on the atrial substrate itself. Wang and colleagues applied plasma multi-omics to coronary sinus blood from persistent AF patients, using supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) patients as controls. Their data point to voltage-dependent anion channel 1 (VDAC1), an outer mitochondrial membrane protein, as a candidate marker of mitochondrial injury. Key Takeaways

Renal biopsy still decides how lupus nephritis is treated, yet the ISN/RPS class a pathologist assigns says surprisingly little about who will lose kidney function. A group working across four tertiary hospitals took aim at that gap with proteomics, running data-independent acquisition LC-MS/MS on formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded biopsy sections from 292 patients. About 5,000 proteins survived quality filtering. Unsupervised clustering split the cohort into two molecular subt