CLN Daily 2026
Mass spectrometry is one of the most powerful tools researchers have for discovering cancer biomarkers — and it’s only one component of the exciting research being done in the lab of Arun P. Wiita, MD, PhD, the closing plenary speaker at ADLM 2026. During his talk on July 30, Wiita will discuss his group’s work integrating chemical biology, mass spectrometry, and computational methods that could lead to new cancer tests and immune-based therapies.
Wiita is a physician-scientist and professor in the department of laboratory medicine and department of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
His group focuses on the “surfaceome,” which refers to the complement of proteins at the plasma cell membrane, because of its astounding potential for therapy targets. “We already know the value of surface proteins for identifying new biomarkers that we use every day in the clinical laboratory,” Wiita said. “[However,] what we use in the clinical lab is only a tiny fraction of the total surface proteins that exist,” he said.
His lab looks to identify new proteins that might be important to the survival of those tumors and could therefore serve as targets for potential medications. They hope to detect proteins that “could be useful not only for diagnostic biomarkers and distinguishing one tumor type from another, but that can also serve as therapeutic handles,” Wiita said. For example, finding new surface proteins could lead to the development of antibody-based therapeutics and immune-cell therapies that attack and eliminate these antigen-positive tumors.
Wiita became interested in this kind of cross-disciplinary approach as a clinical pathology resident at UCSF, where he learned about mass spectrometry during an elective. He worked with Alan Wu, PhD, DABCC, FACB, co-core laboratory director at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and professor of lab medicine at UCSF, and Kara L. Lynch, PhD, associate clinical professor and associate division chief of the chemistry and toxicology laboratory at UCSF. Wu is also the winner of this year’s ALDM Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine.
“Prior to that, I did my PhD in single-molecule biophysics and thought I wanted to go into laboratory medicine to develop these single-molecule approaches,” Wiita said.
After working with Wu and Lynch, he realized two things: First, he wanted to do patient-centric research that would hopefully lead to new therapies; and second, he hoped to harness the power of mass spectrometry to understand biomarkers on a much broader scale than he previously imagined. “Instead of one protein at a time, we could look at thousands of proteins at a time,” Wiita said.
Although his current focus is on blood cancers, Wiita hopes that uncovering proteins as part of a cell’s surfaceome could ultimately benefit patients with other diseases, like autoimmune disorders or neurological diseases.
He wants ADLM 2026 attendees to come away from his session with a broader understanding of how the tools of the laboratory could shed new light on clinical care. “I want them to think about new angles,” Wiita said. “How can we use some of these same principles but then [put them] into action and therapies that treat cancer?”
Jen A. Miller is a freelance journalist who lives in Audubon, N.J. +Bluesky: @byjenamiller.bsky.social.