About
Albuminomics is curated by Dr Souleiman El Balkhi, a researcher in pharmacology and toxicology at INSERM UMR1248 (P&T) / CHU Limoges, France, working with colleagues on how the modifications of blood proteins — above all albumin — reveal disease.
Research areas
Souleiman El Balkhi’s work spans:
- Human serum albumin post-translational modifications (PTMs) and, more broadly, protein PTMs as clinical biomarkers — the field of albuminomics.
- Exchangeable copper and relative exchangeable copper (REC) for the diagnosis and monitoring of Wilson disease — see exchangeable copper.
- Liver-injury diagnosis, including drug-induced liver injury (DILI) and the non-invasive staging of chronic liver disease.
- Top-down mass spectrometry and absolute quantification of intact protein isoforms.
Key contributions
- Relative exchangeable copper (REC) — a copper–albumin binding biomarker for Wilson disease, now recommended for Wilson-disease diagnosis in the 2025 EASL-ERN Clinical Practice Guidelines. See exchangeable-copper.
- The Serum Enhanced Binding (SEB) test — a functional assay of albumin’s binding capacity that detects liver injury earlier than standard enzymes. Lead inventor (with F. Saint-Marcoux and J.-B. Woillard); patent WO 2020/104458 A1 (granted EP 3 884 280 B1).
- HSA isoform profiling for liver-fibrosis staging — the ALBOM study (Scientific Reports, 2026), showing that the albumin PTM fingerprint stages chronic liver disease and outperforms FIB-4.
- Absolute quantification of protein isoforms by internal calibration — an equine-myoglobin internal-standard method for top-down LC-MS (lakis-2024); patent WO 2025/099157 A1.
Institution
Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmacovigilance — INSERM UMR1248 (P&T), University of Limoges and CHU Limoges, France.
Contact
Dr Souleiman El Balkhi — [email protected]
See also
What is albuminomics? · History of the inventions · Exchangeable copper · Wilson disease · SEB test