ANN ARBOR—A protein separation process developed at the University of Michigan has been named one of R&D Magazine’s 100 most technologically significant developments of the past year, joining such previous winners as the flashcube and the automated teller machine. ProteoSepTM, the brainchild of U-M chemistry professor David M. Lubman, will be featured in the September issue of R&D Magazine and showcased at an October awards ceremony. ProteoSepTM separates cellular proteins in hours instead of the days that previous methods required, an advance that could greatly aid efforts to understand how normal cells function and what goes awry in diseases such as cancer. The method can easily be adopted by medical research and pharmaceutical laboratories because it employs conventional high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) techniques, already widely used in such labs. Lubman says the new technique, which has been licensed to Eprogen Inc. of Darien, Illinois, has the potential to help researchers understand how various drugs affect protein expression and how cellular proteins change as a cell turns cancerous. It eventually may help physicians predict the course of a particular patient’s disease and decide how to treat it.