Carnegie Mellon Creates Protein Software to Locate Cancer
Biomedical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have created a new software tool which uses protein patterns to detect cancer in human tissue.
PhD student Justin Newberg and Professor Robert Murphy developed the protein pattern recognition software to automate the analysis of detailed images captured by modern microscopes. The software analyzes the precise location of protein biomarkers so scientists can determine the condition of the cells. As one of the researchers explained,
“Distribution of proteins in a cell or group of cells can be used to identify the state of surrounding tissue, whether it is healthy or diseased. So, our tools can be used to develop novel approaches to screen tissue, which could have an immense benefit in such things as cancer diagnosis.”
Justin Y. Newberg
Editor, Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society Newsletter, CMU
The team has already used the software to analyze eight major subcellular patterns in the Human Protein Atlas, a scientific database containing more than 3,000 images of proteins in healthy and malignant human cells. The software proved so successful in characterizing these first images that Newberg and Murphy have announced plans to continue analyzing the rest of the atlas.
If you’d like to learn more about this research, the work has been published in the April 25, 2008, online edition of the Journal of Proteome Research, published by the American Chemical Society.
Source: Carnegie Mellon Press
Related Links: rdmag.com; scientistlive.com
Technorati Tags: oncology research; computational biology; Pittsburgh, PA
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