WRAL Tech Wire

UNC researchers, Life Sciences part of protein-mapping study

Get the latest news alerts: Follow LTW at Twitter

Local Tech Wire

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are part of a federally funded team that will conduct a pilot study to assess the feasibility and scalability of a project that aims to measure all of the proteins in the human body.

The project, based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, got $4.8 million in federal stimulus funding from the National Cancer Institute.

"If successful, this study could help to stimulate a larger international endeavor that would be comparable to the Human Genome Project," said Amanda Paulovich, M.D., Ph.D., a geneticist and oncologist in the Hutchinson Center's Clinical Research Division who is co-leading the effort with Steven Carr, Ph.D., a senior scientific leader in protein biochemistry and proteomics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. A senior adviser on the project is N. Leigh Anderson, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of the Plasma Proteome Institute in Washington, D.C.

UNC and Massachusetts General Hospital investigators are on the team, and the project has a partnership with the Applied Biosystems branch of Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE).

"In the same way that the Human Genome Project has had a tremendous impact on our ability to measure the expression levels of all 21,000 genes in human cells, we hope that the long-term output of this effort – the human Proteome Detection and Quantitation (hPDQ) project – will allow us to build a method to measure the products of those genes, which are the more than 100,000 proteins in the human body," Paulovich said.

Editor's Blog

The latest blog posts from our WRAL Tech Wire and WRAL editors. Read more articles…