Lecture: Proteomics technologies shed light on cellular and disease mechanisms

The Copenhagen Bioscience Lectures are a series of open lectures for all researchers and other interested in and around the Copenhagen area. Every 4 weeks, on a Thursday evening, you are invited for lectures on themes with a general interest for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Research Centers and bioscience researchers in general. Often there will be a cross-disciplinary focus. We are happy to announce Matthias Mann with a talk about how “Proteomics technologies shed light on cellular and disease mechanisms”. His colleage Alberto Santos Delgado will present “A clinical knowledge graph for Big Data: from data and networks to understanding”. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics aims to identify and quantify all the proteins and their modification state in a biological system. The current state of this technology will briefly be summarized, followed by examples of its use in diverse biological and medical areas. Matthias Mann’s group has used cancer proteomics to discover a biomarker of ovarian cancer called CT45. Women, who express this protein have almost doubled survival time and we have employed multiple dimensions of proteomics to define the mechanism by which this happens (Coscia, et al. Cell 2018). Furthermore, by ‘phospho proteomics’ they can determine the activation state of thousands of proteins. They have used this technology to unravel the elusive substrate of the LRRK2 kinase, which when mutated causes Parkinson’s disease with very high penetrance (Steger et al, eLife 2016, 2017) and shown proof of principle that the harmful effects of opioid signaling can be suppressed in a targeted manner (Jeff Liu, et al. Science 2018). Finally, Matthias Mann will discuss the current state of Plasma Proteomics Profiling, a new technology to determine the health or disease state from the proteins in a finger prick of blood plasma.