Pharmacoproteomics Proteomics and Drug Therapy

The FDA recently released its Critical Path Opportunities List (see Section 14.10). One of six broad topic areas of opportunity listed is Harnessing Bioinformatics. Accordingly, the field of bioinformatics, which was introduced in Section 3.4, is discussed here in more detail. Given the importance of drug receptors throughout the book and the fact that drug receptors are typically proteins, the contribution of bioinformatics to our knowledge of proteins is of particular interest here. As Holmes et al. (2005) commented  

Soloviev et al. (2004) captured the nature of the developing field of proteomics in the following  

Characterization of the complement of expressed proteins from a single genome is a central focus of the evolving field of proteomics. Monitoring the expression and properties of a large number of proteins provides important information about the 

Proteomics involves the systematic analysis of proteins to determine their identity, quantity, and function (Soloviev et al., 2004). Until recently, the study of proteins focused on individual proteins using various established techniques such as gel-electrophoresis and chromatography. Hie advent of high-throughput automated technologies is now facilitating the move toward simultaneous analysis of all the proteins in a defined protein population (Soloviev et al., 2004, see also Jones and Warren, 2006). 

One of the major facilitators of DNA research has been researchers ability to generate almost unlimited quantities (copies) of a target nucleic acid sequence by using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques. Currently, however, there is not an equivalent technique for proteins, and so research techniques have to study the very small amount of molecules that are produced in vivo. Three strategies of interest in protein research are  

---