Earlier this year, Leigh Anderson made a compelling argument in a Genome Technology cover story on biomarkers that without the validation step, biomarker discovery on its own doesn't mean a whole lot. "You could say that a biomarker candidate is discovered with proteomics," Anderson told us at the time, "but it’s possible to say that it’s really not a biomarker until you validate it. So, in a peculiar sense, the discovery actually occurs at the stage of validation."