"In the early days of biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] needed a way to test new drugs in the laboratory and make sure they worked," said Hancock, a professor of chemistry at Northeastern University.
Specifically, researchers needed a window on proteins, because nearly all disorders -- from diabetes to Alzheimer's disease to cancer -- are based on too much, too little or malformed proteins.
In 1978, Hancock and his research team at Massey University in New Zealand published the first means of separating proteins using a laboratory workhorse called HPLC, then short for high-pressure (now high-performance) liquid chromatography. At that time the Human Genome Project and its ambitious goal to decipher the complete coding of the body's proteins was more than a decade away, but Hancock's analytical methods would play an increasingly important role.
"The Human Genome Project was about the genetics of proteins, and now it's a global study of the proteins themselves," he explained. "We take cellular proteins, fragment them, separate them by HPLC and then use mass spectrometry to identify each of the peptides," or protein fragments.
Once researchers understand the pieces, they can reassemble them in a virtual sense to learn what proteins are characteristically present, and in what quantities, in a tremendously complex mixture such as blood. Hancock himself is using the approach to understand how patients' protein profiles change with the onset of cancer.
When asked how he first became interested in science, Hancock said he liked astronomy but particularly chemistry as a boy growing up in Australia. "I had a great time in the garage with a chemistry set," he remembered, then added with a laugh, "Let's just say it's still standing."
Hancock received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Adelaide in 1966 and 1970. He is a member of the ACS division of analytical chemistry.
The ACS Award in Chromatography is sponsored by SUPELCO, Inc.