Written by Ajanthy Arulpragasam Wednesday, 10 December 2008 14:20
Traditional drug discovery methods aim to produce drugs to target specific diseases but the Perth-based firm aims to find the drugs first, then determine their use in medicine.
“We have gone a different way in drug discovery. Instead of taking an assay for a specific disease, we reserve the assaying work until much later in the process,” says director of Proteomics International, Dr Bill Parker.
Proteomics International sources its potential drug targets from the venoms of arthropods including scorpions and centipedes. The venom is subjected to mass spectrometry techniques which identify the venom’s protein composition (amino acid sequence).
“What we do is take venoms from arthropods. We fractionate them, we then pass them through a mass spectrometer and we sequence the amino acid sequences from the mass data,” says Dr Parker.
“Then what we do is look at public databases of proteins and genes and we look for homology.
“We are not interested in zero homology nor are we interested in 100 percent homology. We are interested in somewhere in the middle where we might find something that has analgesic properties or is an anti-microbial.”
If the amino acid sequence of a particular venom sample is a promising target, the molecule is synthesised in a laboratory and subsequent assaying begins to find a possible function of the molecule. Over time, Proteomics International is assembling an amino acid library for a wide range of diseases.
“With all our discards, we don’t discard the data, we keep the data because that then may match something in the future and we will continue to build this library of amino acids sequences,” says Dr Parker.
Eventually, pre-clinical trials will examine the toxicity, anti-microbial activity or analgesic properties of potential drug targets.
Proteomics International is currently collaborating with groups at Curtin University of Technology and the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University to generate algorithms to automate the manually derived amino acid data of potential drug targets.
The company is also working with partners in Alice Springs to source arthropod venoms.
