A new facility in Manchester will use advanced mass spectrometry to measure hundreds of proteins from a single blood or tissue sample in minutes, not hours. The problem is that genomic data alone often fails to predict which treatment will work for a given patient. Proteins are the molecules that actually carry out cellular functions, and their levels shift with disease and drug response. Until now, measuring many proteins quickly and accurately from clinical samples has been technically impractical, limiting the use of protein biomarkers in routine medical decisions. If the facility succeeds, doctors could identify protein markers that distinguish patients who will respond to a drug from those who will not—before treatment begins. This would allow them to prescribe the right therapy for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, or cancer from the start, avoiding ineffective drugs and their side effects. The economic benefit is that expensive drugs would no longer be given to patients who cannot benefit. The facility will also be open to researchers from other universities and pharmaceutical companies, extending its impact beyond Manchester into diagnostic development and translational medicine.
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The genomic and post-genomic age promises much for clinical medicine, as we can now sequence genomes (the blueprint), and measure gene expression fairly routinely and now we can measure the amounts of proteins (the structural and catalytic functional entities in the cell) produced. Yet, to date, the biomedical community have struggled to integrate these technologies and generate the impact anticipated some years ago. The University of Manchester proposes to engage with this challenge by setting up a completely new facility, building on its strengths in biochemistry, to enable clinicians to choose the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. The biochemistry base that will be built, using state of the art technologies, can serve this objective in a number of different ways for a wide range of different diseases. Furthermore, the benefits generated from the facility will be available to researchers from other universities and industrial partners (such as drug companies) to use, with the aim to maximise its impact in diagnostic and translational medicine beyond Manchester. This new facility will use a new development of mass spectrometry that supports the measurement of many proteins within a sample (such as blood, urine, or from tissue such as a tumour biopsy) within a much shorter time than has ever been possible before. Such techniques will be of huge benefit to clinical researchers as it will allow them to see the differences between samples from, for example, healthy people and people with a specific disease - this will give insights into how that disease develops and, importantly, how it might be treated. In addition, by examining the differences in the levels of particular marker proteins from patients who respond to a drug compared to those who don't respond, doctors will be able to identify which drug is the best treatment for individual patients. This will have economic benefit as drugs will not be used on patients who will receive no benefit from them. We will look in the first instance for such protein markers through the disease course, and treatment response in rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and cancer.
Anne Barton (Co-Investigator)Anthony David Whetton (Principal Investigator)Christopher Griffiths (Co-Investigator)Graeme Black (Co-Investigator)Iain Buchan (Co-Investigator)Ian Jacobs (Co-Investigator)Robert Graham (Co-Investigator)Simon Hubbard (Co-Investigator)
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