Opinion: STAT+: The U.S. is at risk of losing the proteomics race to China

Every few decades the United States launches a big science project. The original “moon shot” was kicked off by NASA’s Apollo Program in the 1960s. Its spiritual successor, the Human Genome Project, was launched in 1990 and concluded a dozen years later with the first sequenced genome. In 2016, the Cancer Moonshot debuted. Now is time for the next moon shot.

We think that it should focus on a field that may surprise many: unlocking the power of human proteins, a field known as proteomics. China has already begun investing heavily in this area, and the U.S. must follow.

One of us is an investor actively seeking companies that are developing technologies and tools to advance science. The other is a professor of chemistry and president of the Consortium for Top-Down Proteomics. We believe this work has the potential to make a greater impact on science than the Human Genome Project.

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