A PRIVATELY owned treasure house of more than 5000 human proteins has been opened up to researchers in the hope that this will speed up the search for new drugs. The proteins, all of a type secreted by cells, include substances such as hormones and growth factors.
The Genetics Institute, a company in Boston, Massachusetts, owns patents on the entire protein collection. It expects that by studying these proteins researchers will find leads for new drugs much faster than they can through current efforts to decode the human genome.
Over the past year, researchers at the institute have been extracting previously unknown proteins from human tissue. Some of these proteins may be linked to disease. "We would like to make all these 5000 proteins available to as many people as possible so we can collaborate with them to make drugs," says Tuan Ha-Ngoc, the institute's vice-president. Not all the proteins ...
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