by Darla Brown

A patient is rushed to the hospital with a third-degree burn. A physician obtains a genetic profile to decide what treatment the patient would best respond to and treats him accordingly. This is the medicine of the future, which is being uncovered today through the study of human genes and proteins.

The study of such elementary units and their functions requires sophisticated and expensive high throughput technology that marries robotics, informatics, and molecular science. An initiative to bring such technology to the Medical School through shared equipment and resources, known as “core laboratories,” will soon evolve into a central research center that will be accessible to all investigators from a variety of disciplines.

The Functional Genomics and Proteomics Research Center will be housed in the new Research Replacement Facility and be home to equipment now found in existing core labs scattered throughout the Medical School, including the microarray core lab, the proteomic core lab, and the quantitative genomics core lab.

Dr. David Loose prepares the microarray printer.

“The vision is to bring this technology in a central core facility to serve as a hub for many types of new research projects,” says Peter Davies, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president for research.

The high-tech equipment in each of these labs give researchers insight into specific gene and protein functions, which is useful for studying a variety of diseases and answering biological questions.

“As a result of decoding the human genome, there has been an enormous increase in the identification of genes and proteins responsible for controlling biological function,” Dr. Davies says. “We can’t study 200,000 proteins at once, but using high throughput technologies we can study large numbers of proteins and genes simultaneously.”

“We’re at the most significant time in biological science since Darwin with the sequencing of the human genome,” adds Dean Stanley Schultz, M.D.

With the aid of high throughput technologies, researchers can decode the intricate functions of the body in normal and disease states

“The regulation of arterial blood pressure, for instance, is a complex process -- involving many organs and proteins – the understanding of which is terrifically complicated. No function such as this is determined by a single protein, so these sophisticated technologies and bioinformatics are needed to help solve these complicated puzzles,” explains Dr. Schultz.

Dr. Gregory Shipley readies a sample.

The top priority of this research is uncovering molecular tools that unlock the mysteries of molecular function.

“Some of those tools may give us leads for new drugs, which would be wonderful; but the tools themselves are extremely valuable because what we most need to know is how to make sense of the genome and how to identify the function of all of these new genes and proteins -- what they do under normal circumstances, and how they are related to disease,” Dr. Davies explains. “When we know that, we’ll be in a much better position to design drugs because we’ll know what we’re shooting for.”

The technology allows researchers to study genes or proteins in different ways and enables them to verify findings by using different tools at varying stages of the investigation.

Researchers may study which genes are expressed by using microarrays. “The microarrays have spots that represent all of the genes expressed in a given tissue, and we can see the effect of a physiological activity or a drug on the activity of the genes in that tissue,” says Dr. David Loose, who heads up the microarray core laboratory.

The genetics core lab, which is housed in the University Clinical Research Center (see page XX) and run by Dianna Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D., is used to study the actual genes. The lab provides sequencing reactions and genotype determinations to study the genetic basis of diseases ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to dental abnormalities.

“We are trying to take advantage of the resources of the Medical School and the Texas Medical Center to contribute something valuable to solving clinical disorders,” Dr. Milewicz says. “There are many questions clinicians need to answer after a patient arrives on the floor, which can be addressed through genomic and proteomic studies.”

The mass spectrometers, which separate proteins based on their molecular weight, reveal change in the level of different proteins. “We’re identifying biomarkers in blood and plasma by looking at changes in proteins as a fingerprint for disease,” says William Dubinsky, Ph.D., director of the proteomics core lab. “This is an extremely powerful tool to characterize and identify unknown proteins.”

By running a real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the quantitative genomics core lab, headed up by Gregory Shipley, Ph.D., is able to validate the microarray or proteomics findings. Dr. Shipley receives samples from around the nation and from around the world to run. “We can give the researcher more insight by running the PCR,” he says.

“With the new facility, we expect to expand and grow the programs. There is an excitement in bringing the technology together, and there will be a synergy in terms of the projects and collaborations,” Dr. Davies says.

The new center will be open not only to Medical School researchers but also to investigators from throughout the UT Health Science Center and the Texas Medical Center.

“Memorial Herman Hospital has a unique patient population, so having a center where clinicians could come and get genetic biomarkers, and bank and process samples would be a big asset for research aimed at bringing basic findings to the bedside and would ultimately help patient care,” Dr. Milewicz said.