Investigation of the human blood plasma depletome of schizophrenia patients in the search for more effective antipsychotic treatments: establishing the methods

Schizophrenia is a chronic disorder whose molecular mechanisms are still to be unraveled. Although diagnostic criteria are well established, the treatment choice is still made by trial and error. About one third of schizophrenia patients do not respond properly to antipsychotic treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to search for biomarkers that predict a successful response to medication. And this answer may be in the human blood plasma proteome. High-abundant proteins are depleted by affinity chromatography from the blood plasma prior to large scale proteome analysis in order to obtain the low-abundance fraction, where the main biomarkers are expected to be found. But this process may remove potential biomarkers inadvertently. Thus, the analysis of the high-abundant fraction (the depletome) is certainly a relevant question in the quest for biomarkers towards effective treatments to schizophrenia. Here we show our first results and optimization on studying the human blood plasma depletome.