Currently, protein sequencing is about 10,000 times slower than DNA sequencing – delaying the discovery of protein biomarkers that can help doctors catch cancer early, and that offer essential clues in how to treat it.
University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator Jay Hesselberth, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, recently received a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award to bring protein sequencing up to speed. The $450,000 award is given by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation to support “exceptionally creative thinkers with high-risk/high-reward ideas.”
DNA sequencing fundamentally changed fields ranging from chemistry, to biology, to medicine, to evolution — making protein sequencing practical could have a similar effect.
“The state of the art is mass spectrometry,” Hesselberth says, “but the problem with mass spec is that we’re rapidly hitting the speed limit of the technology – we need a different way to identify proteins, and this is one way to do it.”
Drawing inspiration from DNA sequencing, Hesselberth has designed a method that can look at billions of protein segments contained in, for example, a human blood draw, all at the same time.
“In DNA sequencing, a sophisticated microscope is used to build a sequence, one block at a time, for millions of DNA templates simultaneously. In this new protein sequencing method, you pull proteins apart one block at a time, but the concepts are the same,” Hesselberth says. “It’s nothing fancy, actually – it uses existing technologies and the innovative part is combining those methods in a new way.”