Friedli Corporate Finance , a Swiss investment bank, is also backing the venture, which intends to sell database information to pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Proteins are the complicated mixtures of amino acids that regulate many of the body's functions.
Genes carry a person's genetic blueprint, including instructions for how proteins carry out activities in human cells. By understanding the form and function of proteins and how they affect the human body, researchers hope to identify targets to cure disease or prevent disease altogether. The quest to create a database of human proteins, however, is very complicated. While there are thought to be 30,000 human genes, there are possibly 10 times more proteins. And each protein's makeup is a lot more complicated to decipher, which requires an enormous amount of computing power.