The Louis-Jeantet Foundation awarded its prestigious 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine to Matthias Mann last Tuesday, Jan 24th, for his contributions to mass spectrometry and the field of proteomics. Matthias Mann, Director of the Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, and his co-workers have developed several of the key technologies that have made modern proteomics possible, including mass spectrometry-based identification of proteins from electrophoretic gels and the SILAC method that underlies many recent quantitative proteomics studies. The foundation highlighted, in particular, his quantitative analyses of cancer cell proteomes, and the promise this work may hold for the future diagnosis and treatment of cancer (e.g. Geiger et al, 2010; Lundberg et al, 2010; Nagaraj et al, 2011).
The 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine was also awarded to Fiona Powrie for her work on immunity and host-pathogen interactions within the mammalian gut. Mann and Powrie will each be awarded CHF 700,000, with the majority of these funds going to help continue these scientists’ research programs.
EMBO Molecular Medicine recently published a related editorial, and contributions from both Mann and Powrie that provide some personal insight into the research paths that led to these important discoveries.
Geiger T, Cox J, Mann M (2010) Proteomic changes resulting from gene copy number variations in cancer cells. PLoS Genet 6: e1001090
Lundberg E, Fagerberg L, Klevebring D, Matic I, Geiger T, Cox J, Algenäs C, Lundeberg J, Mann M, Uhlen M (2010) Defining the transcriptome and proteome in three functionally different human cell lines. Mol Syst Biol 6: 450
Nagaraj N, Wisniewski JR, Geiger T, Cox J, Kircher M, Kelso J, Pääbo S, Mann M (2011) Deep proteome and transcriptome mapping of a human cancer cell line. Mol Syst Biol 7: 548
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