Hey Ray Strand..... Whattaya think??  New Labs! ...... murray


Science Moves to Unlock Human Protein Secrets
Justin Gillis  - Washington Post Service
Saturday, February 10, 2001

Huge Effort Shapes Up to Exploit Genome Map Behind new brick walls
in Germantown, Maryland, drills whir and saws whine as workers put
finishing touches on a laboratory unlike any ever built. By the azure
waters of San Francisco Bay rises the steel skeleton of a new university
research center. Another is going up in Baltimore. A Toronto company
lays plans to triple its laboratory space, backed by one of the biggest
names in U.S. business.
Sensing the opportunity of a lifetime, top scientists around the world are
preparing huge new laboratories, forming institutes, ordering massive
computers and striking collaborations in order to tackle one of mankind's
greatest challenges: understanding the human body down to the level of
molecules.
Many of the efforts are financed by companies and investors hoping to
profit from new discoveries. The race will begin formally in a matter of
days when two groups, the publicly funded, internationally celebrated
Human Genome Project and its upstart rival, Celera Genomics Corp. of
Rockville, Maryland, plan to publish the first serious scientific
descriptions of the human genome, the entire complement of
genetic material that encodes the biology of
the human race.
The forthcoming papers follow an announcement
made last year at the White House that a first
draft or map of the genome had been completed.
Detailed maps are a couple of years away, but
the world's leading biological thinkers are not
waiting. At Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, for example, two anonymous donors
have given scientists $100 million to pursue
new genetic initiatives.
"This is really astounding that we've gotten to
the level where we have databases that we can
go in and click and look at almost every region
of the human genome," said Chi Dang, vice
president for research at John Hopkins. "It's
absolutely wonderful to see this thing emerging
as fast as it has."
Central to the effort to understand the genome
is likely to be an up-and-coming discipline
known as proteomics, the study of proteins. The
point of genes is to provide cells with
instructions for making proteins, which carry
out the molecular functions that keep a human
body alive, such as producing energy, breaking
down waste and fighting infection. With the
fundamental instruction set - the list of human
genes - nearly in hand, scientists are starting
to think about understanding the normal
chemistry and biology of every human protein.
They want to use that knowledge as a
springboard to understanding how the normal
biology changes in ailments ranging from cancer
to depression.
The number of chemical interactions they will
eventually need to analyze in detail could
easily reach into the billions. The problem is
far larger than the effort to map the genome,
which has taken more than a decade of work by
laboratories around the world. Tackling it will
demand researchers schooled not just in biology
but in physics, chemistry and computer science,
working together on a scale never seen before
in the biological sciences.
The building going up in Germantown will house
greatly expanded laboratories of Large Scale
Proteomics Inc., a company that aims to create
an index of all human proteins. In Toronto, MDS
Proteomics Inc., plans to do something similar
with help from International Business Machines
Corp., and then use the information to develop
new drugs.
California is forming a state institute
involving three universities, headquartered in
a new building in the San Francisco Bay area,
that will bring the "hard sciences" of physics
and chemistry to bear on understanding proteins
and their interactions. Johns Hopkins is
putting up a building to house two institutes
and numerous computer scientists devoted to a
deeper understanding of genes, proteins and
genetic treatments.
Genes can be sliced and diced in various ways
to create proteins, so the human body may have
10 or 20 times as many types of proteins as
genes, and each one of these can undergo myriad
chemical changes. One widely quoted estimate
puts the number of chemical interactions
scientists ultimately need to understand at
20 billion.
"Scale is important because the size of the problem is very large," said Frank
Gleeson, head of MDS Proteomics. "It's not for the faint of heart."
Thus are visionaries now sketching out proteomics factories, poring over
laboratory blueprints and courting wealthy donors and Wall Street financiers.
Companies are not mounting huge projects just for the love of knowledge. The
scent of money is in the air. The proteomics companies are betting, for
example, that drug companies will pay dearly for information that helps them
determine which drugs are likely to cause side effects by interfering with
desirable proteins. That would permit them to avoid spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on human tests before the problems come to light. For
similar reasons, Celera, the private company creating its own genome map, has
raised about $1 billion to start a major push into proteomics.
"As a scientist you're saying, 'Let's take on the big-science problem and
attack it,"' said William Rich, president and chief executive of Ciphergen
Biosystems Inc. of Fremont, California, another company in the field. "As a
businessman, I'm trying to see where the low-hanging fruit is here."
Academic scientists chasing the new field are somewhat reluctant to refer to
their work as "proteomics," fearing that it has become a Wall Street buzzword.
One exception is Harvard University, which has started an Institute of
Proteomics. But under several names, universities plan to do much the same kind
of work as the private companies, albeit with more of a focus on basic science.
The universities are beginning to receive money for their endeavors from the
National Institutes of Health. Also, the U.S.
Department of Energy, which controls the
national laboratories, is making a major push
into protein research. Some work is under way,
and a Department of Energy advisory panel has
recommended that the Bush administration commit
some $200 million a year for a broad new
initiative.
"The technology of the genome project pales in comparison to what's
required for the next stage," said Ari Patrinos, associate director of
biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy.
"The instruments of big-time science are going to be central to the next
stage."

http://www.iht.com/articles/10239.htm

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