Dr. Jean Gao has received a $356,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation as the principal investigator to study biomarkers that help identify early
disease detection and help in the discovery of new drugs.
Dr. Gao is collaborating with researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center at Dallas on the project. Their experiments will be driven by a series of case studies,
including ovarian cancer early relapse monitoring and prostate cancer diagnosis.
The research team will seek to identify serum proteins that are closely associated with
disease biomarkers. Protein and peptide abnormalities are expressed differently in healthy
people than they are in people with disease.
The project will construct a high-throughput proteomic profiling analysis toolset called a
Proteomics Biomarker Information System that can provide early biomarker detection and
identification for clinical proteomics healthcare. The researchers are using two methods to
identify the biomarkers: high resolution profiling to analyze the low-molecular weight end of
the proteomic spectrum for more precise analysis, and an identification and sequencing of the
underlying discriminatory proteins and peptides to reveal the insights of biomarkers and
characterize disease pathway.