Pharma teams up for huge proteomics study

A consortium of 14 pharmaceutical companies are teaming up to analyse 300,000 blood samples held by the UK Biobank. Researchers at the Regeneron Genetics Center will measure each sample for as many as 5,400 different proteins. Combined with genetic and health data, the results should help scientists at the firms develop blood-based diagnostics and identify new drug targets. As is standard for deals with UK Biobank, the consortium will get exclusive access to the data created by the study for a short period before they are made available to approved researchers worldwide.