Upleveling Proteomics to Better Understand and Detect Human Disease

Description:
For over twenty years, the Kelleher Group has invented new methods to discover the exact forms of protein molecules in human cells. The world has come to call these “proteoforms” and Kelleher uses so-called “Top-Down” Proteomics to discover, characterize and assign function to them with increasing efficiency. With >350 papers, Dr. Kelleher is a cross-disciplinary investigator with international impact in proteomics (the study of proteins).  Together with colleagues in a research consortium (https://www.topdownproteomics.org/), this emerging approach to measure proteins with complete molecular specificity is being advanced to improve the detection and assignment of function to protein modifications and complexes. Kelleher has mentored 52 Ph.D. students, >200 postdoctoral scholars, and >200 undergraduates. After a breakthrough Nature paper in 2011, Kelleher has continued to push the boundaries of proteomics and is currently advancing a compositional map of proteins in all cell types of the human body.  This “domestication” of the human proteome via precise compositional mapping will improve the efficiency of basic and clinical research and therefore enhance diverse goals for the 21st Century, including designer organs, personalized medicine, and early detection of human disease. A recent article in Science (2022, 375: 411-418) typifies the promise and crescendo of activity in the area of proteomics, advanced consistently by Kelleher over the past 25 years.

Speaker: Neil Kelleher - Northwestern University