Bioinformatics Aids Proteomics Research

Amir Najmi, PhD

All living cells contain proteins. Changes in proteins are influenced by both genetics and environment and drive our susceptibility to diseases and responsiveness to treatment. That is why Harvey Cohen, MD, PhD, studies them. "Everything that happens to us is a result of both our genetics and our environment," says Cohen, who is the Adalyn Jay Chief of Staff at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Proteomics, the study of proteins, has benefited in recent years from the burgeoning field of bioinformatics. Using bioinformatic techniques, researchers can rapidly analyze masses of data as they search for protein biomarkers to aid in the diagnosis and prognosis of childhood diseases. Among the diseases scientists in Cohen’s lab are working on is one causing blindness in premature babies, called retinopathy of prematurity.

For the past three years, Amir Najmi, PhD, consulting assistant professor of pediatrics, has been volunteering to help analyze Cohen's data, trying to spot proteins that look like probable biomarkers for retinopathy of prematurity and other conditions, with the hope of predicting which children will get certain diseases. Currently a statistician at Google, Najmi says that research problems are increasingly becoming problems of data analysis. Researchers who once could make only a few measurements on a blood sample now can measure thousands of proteins on a single sample. "That calls for a very different kind of statistics than what we have been doing in the last couple of hundred years," says Najmi.

Cohen agrees. For this type of intensive medical research, Cohen says that in addition to biologists and clinicians, he needs to work with informatics experts, who both understand this area and can develop the sophisticated mathematical technologies needed. "Combining the talents of these different disciplines gives us a very powerful way to explore the molecular basis of childhood diseases and develop better therapies to treat these diseases," he says.