Research focus

Neurodegenerative diseases are currently not curable. This is due on the one hand to the lack of knowledge of the molecular background of the diseases and on the other hand to the lack of adequate methods for early diagnosis. One focus of the Medical Proteome Analysis competence area is the development of mass spectrometry-based methods for the identification of disease-specific protein signatures for diagnostics and also for a better understanding of the disease processes at the molecular level.

Specific biomarkers are essential for diagnosing cancers earlier and predicting their course in order to improve therapy. One focus of the Medical Proteome Analysis competence area is the identification of protein biomarkers that can be used for differential diagnostics but also as therapeutic target molecules. For this purpose, we examine cell culture models, tissue and body fluids using mass spectrometry-based methods.

The bioinformatics of proteomics works methodologically closely with the competence area of medical proteome analysis and carries out the bioinformatic and biostatistical evaluations of the measurement data. Here, not only are already established workflows used for the biomarker detection of neurological and oncological diseases, but new bioinformatic methods are also developed and existing evaluation software optimised (e.g. Uszkoreit J et al. J Proteome Res. 2015; Uszkoreit Jet al. J Proteome Res. 2015; Turewicz et al. J Biotechnol. 2017; Uszkoreit et al. J Proteome Res. 2019; Uszkoreit et al. J Proteome Res. 2021).