HEC to fund study of ‘Protein Biomarkers for Early Detection of Disease’
By Bushra Rafique

ISLAMABAD—The Higher Education Commission’s Departmental Development Working Party, in its recent meeting, has approved a project to fund a ‘Study of Protein Biomarkers for Early Diagnosis of Disease’. The project will be undertaken by the School of Biological Sciences of the University of the Punjab, Lahore.
A strong and productive research group to be developed under this project shall make important contributions in achieving the ob ectives of the Proteomics Laboratory, being established in the School Biological Sciences. The project will be undertaken by Prof. Paul Luciw and Dr. Imran Khan of the School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, USA, as pioneers in developing labeled bead based multiplex protein assays. The principal scientists will exchange visits to each other’s laboratories at leas once a year to plan mutual experimental work, deliver seminars on latest developments and to undertake specific experiments.
The forms of cancer included in this project study ie lung colon and pancreas are amongst the deadliest forms of malignancies. In most cases when the disease is detected, it is already too late to be cured; resulting in not only high number of fatalities, the treatment of such patients places a heavy financial burden on the families. This makes the necessity of methods to screen the population to detect the disease at an early stage. Initially four researchers along with their principal investigator shall work on the proteomics of different pathological states including diabetes mellitus Type 2, lung cancer, colon and liver cancer.
Undergraduate students shall also be involved in undertaking experiments on some specific aspects of the experimental work, which will prepare them to undertake further research for a higher degree.
The goal of a cancer screening programme is to detect tumours at a stage early enough that treatment is likely to be successful. Moreover the screening tool must be sufficienty noninvasive and inexpensive to allow widespread applicability. For instance, a substance secreted by tumour tissue, not secreted by a non-tumour tissue, and easily and cheaply detectable in serum or urine is therefore an ideal biomarker because cancer is detected specifically and non-invasively. Biomarkers however may be more complicated or indirect, involving for example measures of immune response to a developing tumour, hormonal changes induced by a tumour or mass spectrometry profiles of serum protein.
Outlines of the experimental work involved will include, samples and clinical examination, D-Liquid chromatography and gel electrophoresis, MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, N-terminal sequencing, PCR and cDNA Cloning, development of diagnostic products etc.