Researchers leverage cutting-edge proteomics platform to unravel the complexities of neurodegenerative disease.
Proteomics company Nautilus Biotechnology and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging today revealed the organizations have been working together to bring Nautilus’ single-molecule proteomics platform into an aging research environment for the first time. The companies revealed that the system, deployed for more than six months at the Buck’s labs in Novato, California, has produced reproducible data from neurodegenerative disease samples, providing new insight into disease-related protein modifications.
Proteomics, the study of proteins’ interactions, structures, and functions, offers the potential to reveal insights into human biology that genomics alone cannot provide. Yet researchers routinely measure less than one-third of the proteome due to technological limitations. Seattle-based Nautilus is developing a platform designed to rise to these challenges by enabling scalable, high-resolution proteome quantification.
The Buck Institute, an independent nonprofit dedicated to extending human healthspan, has been using the Nautilus platform, its first external field evaluation unit, to study proteoforms of tau, a protein closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding the diverse modifications of tau proteins is critical to uncovering mechanisms that drive neurodegeneration and cognitive decline. Using Nautilus’ proprietary tau proteoform assay, researchers at the Buck were able to quantify multiple proteoform groups, applying the company’s Iterative Mapping method to generate detailed views of disease-related protein modifications.
“In a short amount of time, our teams have swiftly built a strong foundation for next-generation proteomics studies to uncover actionable new insights into disease pathology,” said Nautilus co-founder and chief scientist Dr Parag Mallick.
Joint research between the two organizations demonstrated that the tau assay produces consistent, reproducible results across different users and laboratory settings. The work suggests that single-molecule proteomics can enable new insights into aging and age-related diseases by allowing direct measurement of complex protein variations that traditional mass spectrometry approaches may miss.
“The results we have already generated on the Nautilus single-molecule proteomics instrument demonstrate robust platform performance, which will enable quantitative characterization of disease-associated proteins in order to understand the complex biology of aging and neurodegeneration,” said Buck professor Birgit Schilling. “Measuring tau proteoforms at this unprecedented level will vastly expand our knowledge and means to study mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions.”
The data generated through this collaboration will be presented at the 2025 Human Proteome Organization World Congress next week. two organizations plan to continue their work together, expanding research on tau biology and publishing additional findings in the coming months.
