Canada Opens First Paediatric Lab That Can Measure Thousands of Proteins From One Drop of Blood

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A tiny blood sample can contain an enormous amount of biological information. At Children’s Hospital in London, Ontario, researchers now have access to Olink technology capable of examining more than 5,400 proteins from a sample small enough to be described as a single drop of blood. The capability is particularly significant in paediatrics, where every millilitre can matter for premature babies and critically ill children.

Canadian hospital organizations describe the London centre as one of the first facilities in the country with access to this technology, creating new opportunities to study disease without repeatedly drawing large samples. Rather than looking for one predetermined marker at a time, researchers can examine thousands of proteins together, searching for patterns that may eventually improve diagnosis, risk prediction and treatment selection.

A Canadian Paediatric Research Centre Is Bringing High-Scale Proteomics In-House

The new capability is centred at Children’s Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre and the affiliated Children’s Health Research Institute, or CHRI. Canada’s Children’s Hospitals Foundations has reported that donor support helped the London centre become one of the first Canadian facilities to provide access to Olink technology. Its high-throughput system can examine more than 5,400 proteins from a very small plasma or serum sample. That represents a major jump from conventional laboratory tests designed to measure one protein, hormone or chemical marker at a time.

For London researchers, having the equipment nearby also changes the practical side of medical research. Children’s Health Foundation previously noted that some specialized analyses had required samples to be sent to locations as distant as Sweden or Boston. Local access can reduce those logistical barriers while allowing investigators to build larger studies involving children treated in Southwestern Ontario. CHRI itself is one of Canada’s largest hospital-based child-health research institutes, with researchers working across neonatal medicine, cancer, neurological disease, inflammation and other conditions.

The Small Blood Requirement Matters Much More When the Patient Is a Baby

A few microlitres may sound like a technical detail, but in neonatal medicine it can be an important advantage. Olink says its Explore HT platform requires approximately two microlitres of plasma or serum for its assay. Children’s Hospital materials have described the amount used in its work as roughly equivalent to a drop of blood. For a healthy adult, reducing a blood draw by a few millilitres is mostly a matter of convenience. For an extremely premature infant weighing well under two kilograms, repeated laboratory sampling can become a meaningful source of blood loss.

Research has documented that problem. An observational study of extremely premature infants found median laboratory-related blood loss of 24.2 millilitres per kilogram during their first four weeks, equivalent to about 28.5 per cent of estimated circulating blood volume. More recent evidence supports efforts to reduce that burden. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 18 studies found that blood-sparing strategies were associated with lower red-cell transfusion rates in preterm infants. Technologies capable of extracting more information from smaller samples therefore fit a longstanding paediatric goal: learn more while taking less.

The Technology Turns Protein Detection Into a DNA-Reading Problem

Olink’s system uses a technique known as Proximity Extension Assay, or PEA. Instead of relying on a single antibody to detect a protein, the method uses pairs of antibodies carrying unique DNA tags. When both antibodies recognize and attach to the same intended protein, their DNA tags are brought close enough to interact. A DNA polymerase then produces a barcode associated with that protein. Those barcodes can subsequently be amplified and counted using next-generation sequencing, effectively converting thousands of microscopic protein-binding events into signals that modern sequencing equipment can process.

That dual-recognition design is important when thousands of targets are tested simultaneously. High-multiplex assays face a basic challenge: distinguishing a genuine biological signal from antibodies attaching to something unintended. Olink reports that 99.5 per cent of the approximately 5,400 assays in its current high-throughput portfolio show negligible cross-reactivity under its validation criteria. Peer-reviewed work examining earlier generations of the platform has similarly documented extensive specificity testing. The result is not a magical all-purpose blood test, but a research tool capable of generating an unusually broad molecular snapshot from remarkably little material.

Thousands of Proteins Can Reveal Patterns That Individual Tests Miss

Genes provide a relatively stable blueprint, but proteins offer a more immediate view of what cells and organs are doing. Inflammation, infection, tissue damage, medication and disease progression can all alter proteins circulating in blood. Measuring them together allows researchers to search for combinations that distinguish one biological state from another. London scientists already have experience with this approach. Research involving CHRI investigators Victor Han and Douglas Fraser used large-scale plasma proteomics to study critically ill COVID-19 patients, identifying protein patterns associated with disease processes and potential approaches to patient stratification.

Large population studies demonstrate how far the approach can scale. A 2024 Nature Medicine study examined roughly 3,000 proteins in 41,931 UK Biobank participants and developed models covering the 10-year incidence of 218 diseases. Small groups of proteins improved prediction beyond basic clinical information for dozens of conditions. In 2026, another UK Biobank analysis involving 23,776 participants found that adding proteomic information improved risk prediction across all 17 diseases studied. Those studies involved adults, so their results cannot simply be transferred to children, but they illustrate why paediatric researchers want comparable molecular tools.

Paediatric Proteomics Still Needs Its Own Definition of “Normal”

A machine capable of measuring thousands of proteins does not automatically know whether a particular result is normal for a newborn, a six-year-old or a teenager. Childhood is a period of constant physiological change, and laboratory values can shift substantially with age, sex and development. Canadian researchers have spent years addressing this problem through the SickKids-led CALIPER initiative, which develops paediatric reference intervals. CALIPER now maintains age- and sex-specific reference information for more than 200 clinical tests based on data from thousands of healthy children and adolescents.

That lesson becomes especially important when moving from dozens of familiar laboratory markers to thousands of research proteins. A protein that appears unusually high compared with an adult population might be entirely expected during infancy or puberty. Researchers will therefore need well-designed paediatric cohorts, replication studies and appropriate statistical controls before newly discovered protein signatures can guide routine medical decisions. Olink itself labels its broad proteomics products for research use rather than routine diagnostic procedures. The immediate opportunity is discovery: finding promising signals that can later be independently validated, simplified into practical tests and assessed in clinical trials.

The Bigger Payoff Could Be Precision Medicine Built Specifically for Children

The long-term attraction of high-throughput proteomics is not simply producing a spreadsheet containing thousands of measurements. Researchers want to identify smaller groups of proteins that answer specific clinical questions: which child is likely to deteriorate, which inflammatory pathway is active, whether a treatment is working, or which existing drug might target the molecular process driving a disease. London researchers have already applied large-scale protein analysis to COVID-19 and long COVID, including work examining thousands of blood proteins and using molecular pathways to identify potential therapeutic targets.

Bringing the capability into a major paediatric research environment could make similar experiments easier across other diseases. Children’s Hospital in London provides specialized care across more than 30 medical specialties and subspecialties and serves tens of thousands of children and families each year, creating opportunities for collaboration between laboratory scientists and clinicians. Yet the significance of the technology will ultimately be measured by what researchers learn from it, not by the number of proteins the machine can count. The breakthrough is the ability to ask much larger biological questions from an extraordinarily small sample—and to do so in patients for whom conserving blood is especially important.

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