Proteome integral solubility alteration via label‐free DIA approach (PISA‐DIA), game changer in drug target deconvolution

Drug protein-target identification in past decades required screening compound libraries against known proteins to determine drugs binding to specific protein. Protein targets used in drug-target screening were selected predominantly used laborious genetic manipulation assays. In 2013, a team led by Pär Nordlund from Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) developed Cellular Thermal Shift Assay (CETSA), a method which, for the first time, enabled the possibility of drug protein-target identification in the complex cellular proteome. High throughput, quantitative mass spectrometry (MS) proteomics appeared as a compatible analytical method of choice to complement CETSA, aka Thermal Protein Profiling assay (TPP). Since the seminal CETSA-MS/ TPP-MS publications, different protein-target deconvolution strategies emerged including Proteome Integral Solubility Alteration (PISA). The work of Emery-Corbin et al. (Proteomics 2024, 2300644), titled Proteome Integral Solubility Alteration via label-free DIA approach (PISA-DIA), introduces Data-Independent Acquisition (DIA) as a quantification method, opening new avenues in drug target-deconvolution field. Application of DIA for target deconvolution offers attractive alternative to widely used data dependent methodology.