OXFORD, UK, June 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Oxford GlycoSciences Plc (LSE: OGS, Nasdaq: OGSI) today announces that it is building a Protein Atlas of the Human Genome that will, for the first time, use sequence information obtained directly from naturally occurring human proteins to identify unambiguously all protein-coding genes in the human genome.
OGS will use its proprietary technology platform and software with a view to substantially completing the Protein Atlas over the next twenty-four months. The continued population of the database is expected to generate revenues for OGS of up to GBP 22.5 million over the next three years, depending on results, under an agreement with a newly announced joint venture company, named Confirmant, owned 50/50 by OGS and Marconi plc. The joint venture is expected to commercialise and distribute these data in early 2002 and will offer a host of broadband services and tools to the biotech and pharmaceutical research communities (see today's separate announcement relating to the Confirmant joint venture).
According to Andrew Lyall, OGS' Chief Information Officer: ``The Protein Atlas provides the next logical step beyond the Human Genome Project (HUGO), providing researchers with a powerful tool to interpret genomic data, especially in the areas of target identification, validation and bio-marker discovery.''
``The identification of all protein-coding genes and their protein products is the next major step in the human genome initiative. The accomplishments of HUGO were impressive, but the attendant excitement created a misperception that all the genes had been identified,'' added Lyall. ``On the contrary, because HUGO relied on computational methods and Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) information, the resulting data are more predictive than absolute. Scientific consensus now suggests humans have 30,000-50,000 genes, but we don't know for sure because there is direct evidence supporting only a relatively small number of these genes. This uncertainty presents a substantial challenge to biologists and pharmaceutical drug developers, which will be addressed by the Protein Atlas.''
Raj Parekh, OGS' Chief Scientific Officer, said that the Protein Atlas of the Human Genome currently being developed will allow researchers to be much more exacting and specific in their work. ``Proteomics is a definitive way to identify protein-coding genes in the genome, precisely and rapidly. By isolating and sequencing naturally expressed human proteins, we can pin-point the true protein-coding genes in the genome. By integrating existing genomic and EST databases into our proteomics data, we are organising the human genome to define genes and their splice variants. Using proteomics to achieve this has required substantial advances in technology, informatics and new algorithms to interpret mass spectral data and data integration methods. OGS has committed several years to researching and implementing a new generation of industrial proteomics and is uniquely placed to be the first to complete this Atlas.''
The Company uses its proprietary proteomics technology to work backwards from naturally occurring proteins to their respective coding genes. First, proteins are micro-sequenced and characterised according to tissue-specific isoforms (protein variants). The protein sequence information is then combined with annotated human genome information contained in the Ensembl database to give a representation of the coding gene's structure. Ensembl is a joint project between EMBL-EBI (European Molecular Biology Laboratory- European Bioinformatics Institute) and the Sanger Centre to develop a software system which produces and maintains automatic annotation of the genomes of various species.
To achieve the objective of completing the comprehensive Protein Atlas, OGS will apply a large repertoire of integrated proteomics technologies, including the latest generation of mass spectrometry instruments from Applied Biosystems and Isotope Coded Affinity Tag (ICAT) technology through a collaboration with Dr Ruedi Aebersold of the Institute of Systems Biology. The computing power required to analyse the data, integrate information from different sources and distribute them will be provided by Marconi, through the Confirmant joint venture... |
