Press releases:

SCRIP. World Pharmaceutical News. January 7th 2004. N0 2915

SWEDEN HIGHLIGHTS
Proteomics research

The second annual meeting of the Swedish Proteomics Society attracted 220 participants from the national and international pharmaceutical industry and academia, 50 more than last year. The focus was wider use of proteomics data in disease research and technology developments within this field.

The SPS was set up in late 2001 to position Swedish proteomics research internationally and act as an interface with international proteomics programmes, to facilitate collaboration between industry and acedemia in the region and to bring proteomics into the early stages of undergraduate education. Gyorgy Marko-Varga, president of the SPS and head of AstraZeneca Proteomics R&D in Lund, Sweden, told SCRIP that 30 undergraduate students who would probably continue on to a PhD had taken part in the December meeting.

...industry

There were eight speakers from academia and four from industry, represented by Novartis and the German drug development company, Cellzome. Proteomics plays a central role in the discovery and development of target-driven drug development and it is becoming a "more and more important component of the pharmaceutical industry", Mr Marko-Varga noted. The meeting focused on disease links and how biomarkers correlate with diseases, he said.

"There is a very strong tradition for protein science in Sweden", Mr Marko-Varga commented. Among the reasons for this are the medical archives that often go back several generations and Sweden's strong position in biotech in general, combining genomics, protein chemistry and molecular biology.

Among the active supporters of the symposium were Applied Biosystems, Amersham Biosciences, Bruker, ThermoFinnigan, Waters/Micromass and the Lund-based SWEGENE Proteomics Research Centre, a functional genomics initiative supported by the Wallenberg Foundation.