Plasma Proteome Adaptations to Hormones at Scale

Sex hormones act as powerful systemic perturbations, reshaping circulating proteins that report on physiology, tissue remodeling and disease risk. In this webinar, you will learn how longitudinal, large scale plasma proteomics can be used to interrogate feminizing gender affirming hormone therapy (GAHT), revealing global changes in the plasma proteome and informing sex specific mechanisms underlying cardiovascular, metabolic and immunological conditions.

Despite the clear physical changes induced by gender‑affirming hormone therapy (GAHT), little is known about how it affects underlying physiological and biochemical processes. In this study, plasma proteome changes were examined over six months of feminizing GAHT in transgender individuals using OlinkTM Explore HT, quantifying more than 5,000 circulating proteins to capture hormone-dependent remodeling at a systems level. The study shows that feminizing GAHT remodels the plasma proteome toward a cis‑female profile, aligns a substantial fraction of GAHT‑responsive proteins with sex‑associated signatures in the UK Biobank adult data, and reveals overlap with menopausal hormone therapy effects in cis women. Collectively, these results indicate that feminizing GAHT reshapes the plasma proteome in a hormone‑dependent manner, with important implications for reproductive capacity, immune regulation, cardiometabolic risk and long‑term health outcomes.

Key Objectives:

• Explore how Olink plasma proteomics, integrated with UK Biobank data, contextualizes hormone-driven changes in disease risk.
• Discover how feminizing GAHT serves as a controlled hormone perturbation model to study systemic proteome remodeling.
• Learn key design principles for applying large-scale proteomics to endocrine, cardiometabolic, and immune research.