WSJ
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By STEN STOVALL
Scientists in Sweden Monday marked the halfway point of a ground breaking effort to map each individual protein in the human body for eventual use in detecting disease and creating new treatments for health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disorders.
When the mapping of all genes in humans was completed in 2001, it showed that humans have only around 20,000 of the so-called heredity units, with each gene coding for a protein.
Proteins, in turn, are vital entities in human cells and are involved in nearly all body functions both in healthy and diseased individuals. Proteins are the targets for virtually all pharmaceutical drugs and for most diagnostics.
There are thus only some 20,000 proteins also created by the human body. Most these have never been characterized.
Human Protein Atlas project, mostly funded by the Wallenberg Foundation and launched in 2003 to find and define all the proteins in humans has now analyzed 10,000 genes and their proteins.
The results promise to be hugely valuable for the pharmaceuticals industry, which is struggling to discover new innovative products amid looming "patent cliffs" for many so-called blockbuster drugs that generate $1 billion or more in annual sales.
"Mapping the human proteins makes it possible to fully exploit the results from the human genome project," said Mathias Uhlen, program director for the Human Protein Atlas project.
"Together, mapping the human building-blocks at the genome and proteome level has the potential to transform modern medicine. Reaching this half way point is significant for the Human Protein Atlas project as it moves us a significantly large step closer to completion, which we anticipate to be in 2015," he said.
Recent years have seen increased interest and investment in a more personalized approach to medicine, aided by better understanding of human proteins.
The approach means doctors can detect disease at a much earlier stage and select the right treatment for each patient.
Research breakthroughs, like the Human Protein Atlas project, will enable earlier and more precise diagnosis, a necessity for selecting patients that actually might benefit from expensive and very targeted drugs which only work for specific small groups of patients, said Dr. Uhlen.
"With this information you can stratify patients—you can divide patients into "responders" and "non-responders", which is a very important field now for the pharmaceutical industry, because they are having a harder and harder time to find and launch blockbuster drugs," Dr. Uhlen said in a telephone interview.
"There now is a trend to try to determine which patients will respond to a particular drug and which will not, so this information from the Human Protein Atlas project can be used for this."
The Human Protein Atlas project is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University. It seeks to emulate the success of the Human Genome Project, focussing on the previously uncharted human proteome.
When complete, the Human Protein Atlas will provide scientists with data for helping detect and treat some of the world's most serious diseases.
The scientists have used genes as their starting point--identifying the associated protein and then choosing a specific region of the protein to act as a template for making associated antibodies, proteins found in the blood and other bodily fluids which the body's immune system uses to target and neutralize foreign bodies.
These antibodies are then used to document the proteins in a large variety of normal human tissues, cancer cells and cell lines.
"We have decided that all information from this project should be made publicly available," Dr. Uhlen said.
Results from Human Protein Atlas project are being put in a massive online database for use by scientists around the world at proteinatlas.org.
The Wallenberg Foundation has donated €100 million towards the Human Protein Atlas project, with a further €10 million coming from the European Union and €10 million from the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Uhlen said. |
