Olink sponsored a pair of live, in-person events in Boston MA, and in San Diego CA recently, where topics ranged from the increased risk of dementia in HIV-infected patients to research looking for new Alzheimers Disease biomarkers in the cerebral-spinal fluid of affected individuals.
At Olink we strive to always improve our platform and products to make it easier for you, the customer, to conduct your protein biomarker analysis. To this end we have collaborated with Fluidigm to make protein analysis simpler than ever when running our 48- and 96-plex Olink® Target panels, and our Olink® Focus custom-designed panels (up to 24-plex).
Diabetes is a complex disease characterized by a combination of different and little understood, causes. The current classification system for the disease characterizes diabetes into three broad types: type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes, but these three categories do not adequately reflect its sheer heterogeneity. This has severe negative implications for the planning of treatment regimens and identifying which patients are at risk of developing complications or comorbidities. Building on previous research which identified five novel diabetes subgroups in Scandinavian diabetes patient cohorts, this study sought to comprehensively characterize differences in inflammation biomarkers between these subgroups using Olink’s inflammation biomarker panel.
In its mission to accelerate proteomics together, Olink encourages the advancement of science through comprehensive support of its customers in their own studies to achieve better insight into their areas of research. Sometimes, this may be achieved through collaboration with other scientists in their fields. As a result, Olink has played a part in creating several consortia involving Olink customers with similar areas of interest, such as SCALLOP, where like-minded researchers work together to publish high-impact papers investigating the association of genes and proteins included in Olink protein panels.
With the advancement of available technologies in recent years, researchers are fast becoming aware of the advantages of using proteomics in their research to better understand human biology and disease and to drive pharmaceutical development towards new and improved therapies. Anders Mälarstig, the director of human genetics at Pfizer, came to this realization early on. While he began his research career using genetics to understand cardiovascular disease, he soon turned to proteomics, and specifically protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs) to take his research one step further. In the following interview, Dr. Mälarstig makes the case for this proteogenomics approach to advance basic and clinical research and speaks to its advantages in the drug discovery and development space.
Dr. Andrzej Krolewski (Find his profile here), the head of the Genetics and Epidemiology section of the Harvard Medical School, has been working on the genetics of type 1 and type 2 diabetes. For the last 30 years, he has been actively investigating diabetic kidney disease in patient cohorts from the Joslin diabetes center, where he is also a researcher.
High-throughput multiplexed proteomic technology is leading the way to the latest developments in pre-clinical disease analysis in drug discovery. The pharmaceutical industry is now increasing its efforts in the discovery of novel drug targets by using protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs), which allows for a more confident inference of disease causality and associated protein regulation. This has the potential to revolutionize the drug discovery process and a major academia-industry consortium is at the forefront of efforts to do just that.
