Protein image courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“Thanks to this exceptional donation, we can boost research into what proteins look like and how they behave and interact in cells and tissues in healthy and sick people,” said Ulla Wewer, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences.
“This insight will provide entirely new opportunities to discover and develop new medicines. By mapping the structure and function of proteins in the healthy human body, we can gain a much better understanding of what goes wrong when you get a disorder.”
It is estimated that the human body produces more than a million different proteins. Even minor changes to a protein can lead to disease.
“The mapping of human DNA is a fantastic achievement but its practical value is still quite limited. We can read the individual letters in the genetic code, but we don’t understand what the words mean. That’s why we need to learn much more about the proteins which the genes code for,” says Gert Almind, CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Protein Research will recruit five research teams, with total staff of about 100 people.
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