Thermo Fisher and UC Davis Establish Center to Advance Study of Metabolomics
Originally posted by BioSpace.
by Vanessa Doctor, RN
Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched a new collaborative unit that aims to standardize the metabolomics community's efforts as it engages in more large-scale cohort studies and clinical research.
The Center of Excellence in Clinical Metabolomics is the product of a partnership between Thermo Fisher and the University of California, Davis West Coast Metabolomics Center. It is based in the UC Davis Sacramento campus and will work on developing a standardized process for the research community.
The center will cover end-to-end metabolic profiling workflows, protocols for analytical controls to monitor instrument performance, optimized liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry methods, and training programs for metabolomics staff, scientists, and core lab managers.
Through the development of advanced metabolomics strategies, the center will provide the metabolomics community with the necessary innovations and best practices to generate accurate, robust, and reproducible results in a cost-effective manner.
As part of the collaboration, Thermo Fisher will provide its Orbitrap technology, such as mass spectrometers, to support the generation of high-quality data alongside its Vanquish Duo UHPLC system. This combination of instruments opens up vast opportunities for translational research and large-scale studies.
"The progress we've made in the areas of vaccines and therapy development during the pandemic would have been impossible without ongoing commitments to invest in and share new scientific techniques, and this underscores the importance of our collaboration with UC Davis. The work we'll do here serves science by refining basic, but critical scientific techniques for metabolomics so they can quickly become clinically relevant," said Mark Stevenson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Thermo Fisher, in a press release.
The metabolomics field has been getting plenty of attention over the years as scientists mark milestones in discovering new drug targets, identifying diagnostic biomarkers for disease, developing tools to predict drug activity and response, and elevate precision medicine as a whole. This will help ensure that patients receive the most targeted therapies with a higher chance of achieving desired outcomes.
The new center's laboratory is an extension of the existing facilities in the Genome Center of the UC Davis campus but will focus on research that translates the preclinical findings to clinical use. It will work with UC Davis medical faculty and staff and selected partners and Thermo Fisher clients to establish 24/7 metabolomic services.
"We aim to provide advance training courses for early career community members as well as independent investigators and scientists, and this will be supported by state-of-the-art technology from Thermo Fisher. This collaboration will drive the creation of innovative analytical approaches for both untargeted and targeted applications, providing the metabolomics community with advanced methodologies for their vital work," said Oliver Fiehn, director of the West Coast Metabolomics Center at the Genome Center.