"This has been the biggest discovery in the last 10 years in the bone area," says Colin Dunstan, senior scientist at Amgen Inc., Thousand Oaks, Calif. In this paper Dunstan, along with Lorenz Hofbauer, head of the Molecular Bone Biology Laboratory at Philipps University, Marburg, Germany, and Sundeep Khosla, professor of medicine, Mayo Medical School, pulled together the various strings that keep bone formation and resorption balanced.
The breakthrough came when Amgen scientists completed a genome screen for novel secreted proteins. Dunstan remembers a member of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) superfamily that was unremarkable until his team looked at X-rays of transgenic mice overexpressing it. Surprisingly, they found that while these animals appeared normal, they had profound osteopetrosis. The researchers then showed that this protein blocked osteoclast differentiation by preventing bone resorption.1 Accordingly, they named the protein osteoprotegerin (OPG). A few months later, Japanese scientists at the Snow Brand ...
