Dr Falko Hochgräfe, postdoctoral researcher at Garvan, was awarded the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) Young Guns Early Career Research Award last week.

Fifteen of the field’s brightest young researchers were shortlisted from around the world to present their findings at HUPO’s 9th Annual World Congress held in Sydney.

Hochgräfe joined Professor Roger Daly’s lab at Garvan two years ago, bringing his expertise in the relatively new field of proteomics.

Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins – their structures and functions – now made possible by new technologies. When a gene is transcribed, or ‘read’, it literally generates proteins, the molecules that do the work in cells.

So protein snapshots, produced by 'Phosphoproteomic profiling', as it's known, tell us which genes are being expressed in a cell at any given time. Not only that, they tell us whether those proteins are ‘normal’ or not.

Hochgräfe’s work, which focuses on protein behaviour in basal breast cancer, has mapped out signalling networks peculiar to the cancer, as well as proteins which could be used to identify it, both of which could lead to treatments in future.

See our media release, describing his latest findings, which were published in the prestigious international journal Cancer Research, now online.