Archive by category | Proteomics

Matthias Mann awarded Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine

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).  Read more

EGFR and c-Met core signaling network

EGFR and c-Met core signaling network

Research highlight by Jeongah Yoon and Thomas S. Deisboeck, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA Targeting receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) is currently thought to be a promising anti-cancer strategy (Baselga, 2006). However, clinical trials with RTK inhibitors demonstrated that some solid tumors are sensitive to these drugs while others are not. For instance, only a subset of non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumors with EGFR-activating mutations seems to respond to EGFR inhibitors (Lynch et al, 2004). The recent study by Guo et al (2008) aims to shed more light on the causes for such selective drug sensitivity by investigating the  … Read more

Top-down mapping of gene regulatory pathways

Top-down mapping of gene regulatory pathways

In a very recent lecture (see full video from NIH VideoCasting) given for the NIH Systems Biology Special Interest Group, Trey Ideker presents a great overview of the various strategies his group has been developing in the recent years in order to integrate multiple types of large scale datasets. While one of the most pervasive ‘meme’ about high-throughput measurement is that they are “notoriously unreliable” (see Hakes et al, 2008, for a recent example), Trey beautifully illustrates how predictive computational models and novel biological insights can be generated by sophisticated data integration strategies. Three types of applications are presented in his talk:  … Read more