APAF, Qiagen team on $1m proteomics project
Monday, 17 January, 2005
The Australian Proteome Analysis Facility, headquartered at Sydney's Macquarie University, is to team up with global life science supplier Qiagen in a AUD$1m research project to develop more efficient ways of removing high-abundance proteins from serum samples.
The three-year project, titled 'Deep Drilling of the Human Plasma Proteome' is part-funded by a $480,000 Australian Research Council linkage project grant.
About a dozen proteins, including haemoglobin, serum albumen, and immunoglobulin, constitute some 80 per cent of all the protein in serum, and they occlude medicine's view of minor proteins like cytokines and cancer markers like prostate-specific antigen (PSA) that may offer life-saving clues to a patient's state of health.
APAF CEO Prof Mark Baker likened the project to turning off the city lights to allow astronomers to observe faint stars in the night sky.
He said more efficient techniques for removing high abundance proteins from human clinical samples will allow researchers to amplify the power of proteomics technologies to discover novel clinical biomarkers of diseases.
"These biomarkers could, for instance, allow for earlier diagnosis of cancer, and protein patterns may also tell us whether people are responding to chemotherapy, and whether they are susceptible to the side-effects of particular drugs," Baker said.
APAF's business development manager, Lindsay Woods, said the agreement gave Qiagen first right of refusal to commercialise new techniques for removing high-abundance proteins from plasma samples.
Woods said APAF already had proof-of-principle for a novel, multi-pass technique employing antibodies to strip high-abundance proteins from serum and plasma prior to analysis.
He said proteins like cell-signalling cytokines occur at extremely low concentrations in cells, but current proteomics technology is capable of detecting proteins present at attomolar (10-18) concentrations.
In November, APAF announced that it was to team with Californian proteomics company LumiCyte (LCI) to further develop LCI's recently launched STS biochip platform.
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