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18 April 2001), along with a big increase inthe number of start-ups seeking venturecapital support in the proteomics field.Several industrial proteome mappingprojects are planned or under way,including Myriad Genetics ($185 million),GeneProt (with 51 mass spectrometers)and also Celera, who, according tocompany President J. Craig Venter, are‘building the largest proteomics facility by far… the size of a football field.’ Thisshould greatly increase the rate ofidentification of therapeutic targets, but,given that the proteome, unlike thegenome, is cell specific and constantlychanging, a Human Proteome Project will be an extremely challengingundertaking. S.L.
Wellcome targets the Britishgovernment
Mike Dexter, Director of the WellcomeTrust, has announced that the Trust will notfund any new buildings but will concentrateits funding on research and equipmentrather than the ‘bricks and mortar’. Dexterwas reported in Britain’s Daily Telegraphnewspaper as saying that such funding wasthe ‘responsibility of the state’ and that‘charities should not become an alternativeto adequate state investment’. Statespending on R&D in the UK has dropped by 12.5% in the past 10 years. Particularemphasis was put on the need to maintainBritain’s competitiveness in science, as wellas the need to suitably fund the runningand maintenance of University researchfacilities. Recent initiatives from thegovernment have sought to redress thedeficit in the research budget, but much ofthis money has itself been contributed bymedical research charities. The Telegraphalso highlights that 23% of the UK research and development budget nowcomes from charities compared with only9% in the USA. D.S.
Stem cell research triumphsTwo recent papers in Science exemplify the steady progress towards clinicalapplication of stem-cell-derived tissue inreplacement surgery. Wakayama andcoworkers from New York’s RockefellerUniversity and Memorial Sloan-KetteringCancer Center provide proof of principle formultistep therapeutic cloning: a somatic cellnucleus could be reprogrammed to produceembryos, from which pluripotent embryonicstem cells (ESCs) were isolated. Nuclei ofmouse cells from a tail biopsy weretransferred to anucleated egg cells and, a few days later, ESCs were derived fromblastocyst-stage embryos. The stem cellcapacity of the newly derived ESC lines wasdemonstrated by differentiating them intodopaminergic and serotonergic neuronalcells in vitro, and the cells passed the acidtest of pluripotency by contributing to thegermline in vivo [Science 292, 740–743(2001)]. In a second report [Science 292,1389–1394 (2001)], a team at the NIH in
Bethesda, Maryland, describes how itapplied new insight into pancreaticdevelopment to successfully differentiatemouse ESCs into insulin-secreting cellsin vitro. Lumelsky et al. transformed ESCsinto small clusters of cells that look andbehave very much like islets of Langerhans:mini-organs comprising beta cells producinginsulin, and glucagon- and somatostatin-producing cells. Tissue produced in vitromight thus benefit diabetes patients, who display malfunctioning of the islets ofLangerhans. J.d.B.
TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.7 July 2001
http://tcb.trends.com 0962-8924/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
285News&Comment
This month’s ‘In brief’ articles were
written by:
Jan de Boer
[email protected] Sean Lawler
[email protected] Stephens
Cancer drug screening whileyou wait
Regardless of your research speciality, it isnow possible to use your desktop computerin the fight against cancer. Running underthe headline ‘don’t just make a donation,make a difference’, a global collaborativenetwork has been established to speed updramatically computer-based drugdiscovery for cancer therapy. The project isfunctionally similar to the phenomenallysuccessful SETI@home project, whichaimed to use spare computing power in thesearch for extraterrestrial life. It is estimatedthat up to 80% of the processing power ofthe average desktop computer is unusedduring routine use – distributed computingsystems aim to exploit this unused power.Individual users download a small programthat can be run either as a screensaver orcontinuously in the background.Cooperation of users in this way providesmore computing power than the largestsupercomputers currently available. TheCentre for Computational Drug Discovery at
the University of Oxford, UK, has teamed upwith Intel and United Devices to generate thevirtual supercomputing network requiredfor the cancer project. The so-called ‘THINK’software is essentially a virtual molecularmodeling package that aims to find potentialanti-cancer drugs from screens against anumber of key proteins implicated in cancer.Users are sent a package of 100 molecules,which are screened in multipleconformations against the three-dimensional structure of targets such assuperoxide dismutase and Ras. The project,funded by the National Foundation forCancer Research, is believed to be thelargest combinatorial chemistry project everundertaken. Over 320 000 users have signedup so far, with the organizers hoping forseveral million. Intel’s role in the projectforms part of the company’s ‘PhilanthropicPeer-to-Peer Program’. Peer-to-peercomputing involves collaboration of users toshare files and resources, enabling greaterfunctionality. Intel has long used peer-to-peer computing internally, and the companybelieves that the technology will allow muchgreater use of computing power in this andmany other medical research applications.
For further information, see:http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.htmlhttp://www.intel.com/curehttp://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/ D.S.
Vascular endothelialgrowth factor – a typicalTHINK screening target.Further molecularstructures can be viewed atthe ‘Cure Cancer’ website.