UCSD bioengineer Trey Ideker has led the charge in creating the first complete map of all known protein networks and how they interact in breast cancer, reports MIT's Tech Review. The hope is to use this to better assess how the cancer will metastasize. The map, which connects 11,203 proteins through 57,235 interactions, finds hot spots of protein networks and shows that these interactions are better than gene expression profiling alone at predicting how breast cancer might spread. "The main idea is that we shouldn't be looking for individual genes but at whole processes with multiple genes and proteins tied together in networks," Ideker says.