“Measuring one protein for a specific reason, such as troponin to diagnose a heart attack, is standard clinical practice. We are extremely excited about the opportunity to identify new markers for screening and diagnosis from the thousands of proteins circulating and now measurable in human blood. What we urgently need are proteomic studies of different populations to validate our findings, and effective tests that can measure disease relevant proteins according to clinical standards with affordable methods.”
-Prof Claudia Langenberg, Director, Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI), QMUL, and Professor of Computational Medicine, Berlin Institute of Health, Charité.
Research was conducted on thousands of proteins from a drop of blood potentially giving the ability to predict the early onset of 67 diseases that included multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, motor neuron disease, pulmonary fibrosis and dilated cardiomyopathy. The proteins’ ‘signatures’ were a predictive indicator for various diseases. The research data was from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP), the largest proteomics study that was carried out to date that had the measurements of approx 3,000 plasma proteins from the randomly selected batch of 40,000 UK Biobank participants. For a prediction of a specific disease, around 5-20 proteins need to be analysed.
The research was published in Nature Medicine on 22nd July. It was an international research partnership between GSK, Queen Mary University of London, Cambridge University, and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité Universitätsmedzin, Germany. The prediction was made based on blood cell counts, cholesterol, kidney function, and diabetes tests that performed less well compared to the protein prediction models for most of the examples of disease conditions and these were the standard, clinically recorded information obtained. The patients’ can benefit from discussing the measure of risk of future heart attack and stroke. The research could potentially open up the possibilities to a wide range of diseases, that involves rarer conditions. Even for those that takes much longer, months and years to diagnose can have rapid diagnosis. These findings required validation from different populations and the absence of signs and symptoms of these diseases in different ethnic groups.
Dr Julia Carrasco, First Author, Postdoctoral researcher, PHURI, says, “Several of our protein signatures performed similar or even better than proteins already trailed for their potential as screening tests, such as prostate specific antigen for prostate cancer. We are therefore extremely excited about the opportunities that our protein signatures may have for earlier detection and ultimately improved prognosis for many diseases, including severe conditions such as multiple myeloma and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. We identified so many promising examples, the next step is to select high priority diseases and evaluate their proteomic prediction in a clinical setting.” Dr Robert Scott, Co-lead Author, Vice-President, Head of Human Genetics and Genomics, GSK mentions, “A key challenge in drug development is the identification of patients most likely to benefit from new medicines. This work demonstrates the promise in the use of large-scale proteomic technologies to identify individuals at high risk across a wide range of diseases, and aligns with our approach to use tech to deepen our understanding of human biology and disease. Further work will extend these insights and improve our understanding of how they are best applied to support improved success rates and increased efficiency in drug discovery and development.”
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