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Beyond the genome: YOU'VE BEEN DECODED, again

Welcome to the world of the proteome

Roughly 95 per cent of new drug candidates eventually fail to be approved, and those that are cost billions to develop

Peptides in the mix

So we end up with hundreds of thousands of peptides in the mix and we have to create and then use relatively complex algorithms to deduce which proteins were most likely to have been present. If we find a unique sentence, we can tie it to a single book. If we find several common sentences but only one book has them all, then we have identified that book, and so on.

This mixing and matching could take up to ten days when the data was processed serially. We have worked with Teradata and got some of the processes down to minutes. To give an idea of scale, Angus has 10 mass spectrometers, each one produces around 7GB per four hours, so, en masse, they are churning out 1.5PB a year, all of which has to be stored and processed.

OK, so you can see HPP is more complicated than the HGP, but how is it shaking things up?

Good question. New drug development takes forever and costs a fortune. To put some numbers on “forever” and “a fortune” the five new AstraZeneca drugs approved between 2007 and 2011 cost $11.7bn each (calculated as total R&D spend for that period divided by five).

It should soon be possible to tailor drug regimens to specific patients. This alone should release a flood of new, usable, drugs onto the market, the development costs of which have already been written off

It turns out that 95 per cent of new drug candidates eventually fail to be approved. So we can speed up the process (and reduce the cost) by orders of magnitude if we can fail the bad candidates as rapidly as possible.

Once we have base-lined the human proteome we can test new drugs in vitro and rule out immediately those that interfere with the enzyme systems that are vital for life and/or well-being. The potential savings are huge.

Take another example. There are many drugs already developed that cannot be used because, although they work fine in 99 per cent of humans, there is a terrible side-effect in one per cent with an unusual proteomic makeup. Just as the cost of genomic analysis has dropped (to the extent that it is now possible to have your own genome sequenced), so will the price of proteomic analysis.

This means it should soon be possible to tailor drug regimens to specific patients. This alone should release a flood of new, usable, drugs onto the market, the development costs of which have already been written off.

That, in a nutshell, is why proteomics will change our world. As a final note, just in case I seem to be saying that the HPP will succeed where the HGP failed, nothing could be further from the truth. The HPP could only have been started once the HGP was in place. Without the pioneering work those guys did, none of this would be possible. They have already rocked the world. ®

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