Once a scientific backwater, protein research attracts billion-dollar deals and high-profile publications

When it comes to de­tect­ing dis­ease and un­der­stand­ing how the body works, pro­tein re­search has long been over­shad­owed by DNA se­quenc­ing.

But the field, known as pro­teomics, has seen a surge of ac­tiv­i­ty in re­cent months. Larg­er play­ers have struck bil­lion-dol­lar-plus deals, a pro­posed $1.4 bil­lion in­ter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion has launched, and new re­search has shown that a pro­teomics can­cer di­ag­nos­tic might chal­lenge some of the DNA-based play­ers that cur­rent­ly dom­i­nate that field.

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