Proteomic technology is moving quickly, and PerkinElmer is keeping up through a bevy of deals as well as its internal expertise.
"The bottleneck [in proteomics] now is preparation," says Kevin King, VP & general manager of molecular medicine at PerkinElmer.
"Isolation is relatively straightforward in genomics, but in proteomics, separation, amplification, and quantification are much more difficult." Already a big player in the field, PerkinElmer is making deals that
"focus on innovative and enabling technologies," King adds, rather than platforms. In early March, the company acquired Agilix's protein labeling technology, which allows analysis and comparison of several protein samples simultaneously or over time. With Agilix's isobaric mass tags,
"You know exactly what you added in terms of mass, and you can subtract that off," King explains.
"For the first time, everyone with a mass spectrometer can do quantitative
proteomics." PerkinElmer also recently signed a long-term licensing agreement around Luminex's xMAP technology, which will be used to develop biomarker panels for drug development and in vitro diagnostics. xMAP allows nucleic acid, biochemical, or proteomic multiplexing using traditional detection methods involving laser-detected
dyes. 
The company has also initiated a collaboration with George Mason University scientists Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin to develop tests for early cancer detection.
"It's a new type of assay that we're describing as immunoMS," explains Mary Lopez, strategic collaborations leader at PerkinElmer. This new technique differs from protein pattern profiling, which Liotta and Petricoin also pioneered. That earlier approach to establishing markers used
"signatures," or patterns of large numbers of proteins, most of which were unknown. With the new immunoMS approach, each peptide biomarker is identified. The number of protein fragments needed for a diagnostic is not yet known. PerkinElmer's BioXPRESSION platform will be used to find predictive peptides, which will then be validated in large-scale clinical trials. The researchers hope this approach will lead to a new paradigm for disease detection using unique
biomarkers. Even more deals lie ahead, as the company is determined to be competitive. As PerkinElmer chief scientific officer, Neil Cook recently told CHI's
PharmaWeek, "Don't expect our scouting and acquisition to end with this deal. We see a lot of areas where there are unmet needs, particularly in proteomics."
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