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The field of genomics has led to the idea of personalized medicine. Many human diseases are associated with genetic aberrations. However, genes produce proteins and proteins do the work. Mutated or dysregulated genes might cause proteins to be abnormally expressed, modified and/or activated, leading to many diseases including autoimmune, metabolic diseases and cancer. Proteins' functions largely depend on their interactions within the cellular microenvironment, specifically within the biochemical signaling pathways in which they communicate with each other. Most targeted therapies directly act on proteins.
A series of high-impact studies published in 2008 in Nature and Science revealed that "cancer is a core signaling pathway disease". These pathways included those regulating control of cellular growth, apoptosis and cell adhesion, intracellular signaling, DNA topological change, and cell cycle. These new findings conclude that each patient has a unique set of pathway alterations. Effective disease management will lie in the ability to know, for each patient, which pathways are "turned on", and to prescribe the targeted therapy designed to turn those specific pathways "off".
These new findings concur and validate the TH's founding philosophy. TH's proteomics platform, developed based on this philosophy, provides the most accurate and comprehensive portrait of protein pathway activation in the diseased cells from each patient.
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