The discovery of hundreds of new proteins by a team spearheaded by Turkish scientist Mine Koprulu in the United Kingdom has become a ray of hope for the development of new treatment methods and medications for a variety of metabolic disorders, including diabetes and multiple sclerosis (MS).
Gates Cambridge, which offers scholarships to successful graduate students at Cambridge University and of which Koprulu is one of its scholars, shared the study led by the Turkish scientist on its Twitter account.
Koprulu is leading a study "that identifies proteogenomic data that could result in new treatments for diseases like diabetes," Gates Cambridge said.
The Turkish scientist told Anadolu Agency (AA) that what makes this study so different from others is that "we used a new technology developed for the first time in the world, measuring levels of 3,000 proteins from people's blood samples in parallel, and integrated them into our study."
She pointed out that the biological mechanism underlying many metabolic diseases such as diabetes, blood pressure, heart and kidney ailments, which are quite common in society, is not very well known.
"We actually systematically analyzed the protein levels of 3,000 proteins in the blood, changes in our DNA, genetic code, and disease risk for hundreds of diseases to exactly address this problem," she said.
Stating that the aim of the research is to shed light on finding more effective drugs or treatment methods for diseases, the young scientist said, "We have undertaken the analysis I mentioned for exactly this purpose, and we have found more than 500 genes, gene changes, protein levels and disease risk triads in our current study."
"We hope this will be the first step toward finding more advanced treatments for hundreds of diseases," she added.
Referring to the important findings of the research, Koprulu noted that they discovered the high level of a hormone called GRP reduces the risk of diabetes and that they also associate the risk of MS disease with the newly discovered protein called DKKL1, about which there is not much information.
Elaborating that she completed her undergraduate education in human genetics at University College London, Koprulu said that after her education there, she completed her master's degree in medical genetics at Cambridge University.
She also stated that she has been working on rare disease genetics for two years at Boğazici University and Istanbul Technical University in Türkiye.