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By Ben Hirschler
LONDON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - AstraZeneca is divinginto the world of proteins secreted by cells - collectivelyknown as the secretome - in the hunt for new drugs and better"cell factories" for making biotech medicines.
The so-called secretome accounts for around one third ofhuman proteins and the idea of mapping them all follows thedecoding of the human genome in 2000, since when there has beena surge in scientific buzzwords ending in "ome".
The secretome is one of the newest as scientists onlyunravelled the full array of proteins involved at the start ofthis year. As a result, its potential as a resource forpharmaceutical research remains largely unexplored.
AstraZeneca hopes to get in on the ground floor of thisopportunity through a three-year collaboration with the newlyestablished Wallenberg Centre for Protein Research in Sweden.
The new centre is being funded primarily by the Wallenbergfamily, which also owns Investor, the third largestshareholder in AstraZeneca.
The Wallenberg Foundation is providing a $37 million grantover eight years for the centre, while the Anglo-Swedishdrugmaker will contribute $1.2 million a year for three years.
In addition to hunting new drug targets for diseases rangingfrom heart disease to cancer, AstraZeneca said in a statement onFriday that its experts would also be looking at proteinsecretion processes that could improve medicine manufacturing.
Currently, the drugs industry relies on a limited number ofcell types - notably Chinese hamster ovary cells - to makebiotech drugs in large fermentation vats. In future, there maybe the potential to tap other kinds of cells that are bettersuited for large-scale production. (Editing by David Evans)
