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A massive research collaboration between 13 pharmaceutical companies and the UK Biobank has uncovered a trove of new leads for drug targets and diagnostic biomarkers, revealing thousands of previously unknown associations with common genetic variants and proteins circulating in the blood.

The work, known as the Pharma Proteomics Project, has the potential to start unveiling the causes of many common conditions. It builds on two decades of work on the role of genetics in disease, pairing existing genetic data with new analyses of about 2,900 blood proteins from 54,000 people.

“Genomics has made a lot of progress for rare diseases and oncology, but for complex diseases, precision medicine is still sort of far off,” Chris Whelan, a director in Johnson & Johnson’s data science & digital health division, told Endpoints News in an interview. “Proteomics could really help unlock a lot of the remaining secrets of the human genome.”

The flagship study, led by Whelan and published in Nature this week, identified over 14,000 associations between common genetic variants and proteins circulating in the blood. A similar paper, led by AstraZeneca, found 5,400 associations between rare genetic variants and blood proteins. More than 80% of those associations in both studies had never been seen.

“The whole paper is ridden with new discoveries,” said Robert Moritz, a professor and proteomics researcher at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle who was not involved in the study. “We’re going to start to understand the protein networks that are being disrupted by diseases, and it gives pharma companies a whole range of new drug targets to look at.”