Olink Insight Unveils Open-access Map of the Human Proteome, Aiding Biomarker Discovery and Understanding of Disease

UPPSALA, Sweden, April 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Olink Holding AB (publ) (Nasdaq: OLK) today announced the availability of an open access data library consisting of over 300,000 protein-disease risk associations, giving researchers a powerful new tool for revealing the biological mechanisms underlying 106 human diseases.

In April 2023, the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP) released data produced from over 50,000 samples analyzed using the Olink Explore platform. The UKB-PPP is the largest population-scale proteomics study to date, yielding an unprecedented view into the biology of diseased and healthy individuals over a 10-year period. By combining protein measurements with longitudinal healthcare data for each of the individuals, Olink derived the estimated effects of ~3,000 proteins on the future risk of disease.

The derived data library is available within Olink Insight. Olink Insight is a free, web-based platform that puts the results of advanced computational data analysis into the hands of non-data scientists. In just a few clicks scientists can quickly go from raw experimental results to the identification of significant hits, overlaid with information on tissue specificity, disease associations, and variability in normal cohorts.

A detailed presentation of how scientists can leverage this data for uncovering disease-specific biomarkers or elucidating the involvement of biomarkers across multiple diseases will be presented in a technical webinar on April 24, 2024.

The disease risk data contained in the library will enable researchers to better understand critical drivers across a broad spectrum of diseases from inflammatory pathways to prostate cancer. The data are a powerful tool for exploring the role of key proteins such as FCRL2 in critical processes like B cell development and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

 “UK Biobank is the world’s leading biomedical data resource, powering research that will improve the health of the public across the globe,” said Dr. Lucy Burkitt-Gray, Lead Data Analyst, UK Biobank. “The Olink findings correlating protein levels to disease risk are one of many prime examples of how the large-scale UK Biobank cohort data on half a million volunteers is contributing to our understanding of how protein expression affects health.”