GEN-MKT-18-7897-A
Jul 1, 2019 | Blogs, Clinical | 0 comments
Steven Wong, Ph.D., DABCC (TC), FACB, Past President AACC, Professor of Pathology, serves as Director of the Clinical Chemistry and Toxicology Core Laboratory and is Co-director of the Clinical and Translational Mass Spectrometry Center at Wake Forest School of Medicine with over 37 years of experience.
Elizabeth Palavecino, MD, serves as Medical Director of Clinical Microbiology and is Co-director of the Clinical and Translational Mass Spectrometry Center at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Q: Please share details about your institution.
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is a nationally prominent academic medical center in Winston-Salem, NC, with an integrated health care network. The Health System includes an 800+ bed hospital serving both an adult and pediatric population with many specialty centers including Cancer and Transplant.
Q: What are your key translational research areas and goals?
We created this translational research unit to look at ways to create new tests for clinical purposes. For example, we have a large population of immunosuppressed patients, so we need a way of testing immunosuppressants or antifungal panels in a rapid way, but also in a very accurate and reliable way. That’s why we started developing these tests using mass spectrometry. Additional focus areas include acute kidney injury, drug toxicity, breast cancer, renal metabolomics, and personalized medicine approaches.
Q: How has implementing mass spectrometry helped allow your institution to provide the best patient care?
Mass spectrometry is no longer confined to the research lab but is becoming part of the routine testing in clinical labs. It was really a clinical necessity for our lab. Mass spectrometry can give me the answer reliably because it is very specific and only requires a very small volume. By bringing the test in house, the turnaround time improved drastically, from 3-4 days to 8-24 hours. That really helped improve patient care.
Q: Why is the SCIEX Citrine™ MS/MS system the right tool to further your diagnostic work?
First is the performance of the mass spec. It has higher sensitivity and is more flexible. Because we are getting it from the same source, it allowed us to establish redundancy in our testing with the two existing mass spec. The enhanced sensitivity allowed us to engage in low-level toxicology testing. The most infamous example right now is fentanyl which is a very potent drug in low concentration. The sensitivity of the newer mass spec allowed us to do an adequate detection of a very highly potent drug like fentanyl.
We have also had extremely positive interactions with both the support service teams within SCIEX as well as the quick response to our needs and are very pleased with that.Learn More About SCIEX Systems >
The Echo® MS+ system is a novel platform for Acoustic Ejection Mass Spectrometry (AEMS) and combines the speed of acoustic sampling with the selectivity of mass spectrometry. This platform has been designed for high throughput analysis of small and large molecules. The technology combines Acoustic Droplet Ejection (ADE), an Open Port Interface (OPI) and could be coupled with the SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system.
The Echo® MS+ system comprises of an open-port interface (OPI) and acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) module which could be coupled with a mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer could either be a SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system. This non-liquid chromatography based; high-throughput screening platform enables rapid analysis of compounds at speeds of up to 1 sample/second.
The ability to consistently achieve reproducible results on many complex samples across multiple days is critical to a routine clinical laboratory. Laboratories relying on analytical instrumentation require stability and robustness to perform a variety of screening and confirmatory assays with confidence. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has become the preferred analytical method in the clinical laboratory to reliably perform clinical testing as it provides best-in-class performance and reliability for the most challenging assays. LC-MS/MS offers the required levels of sensitivity and specificity for the detection and quantitation of molecules from complex biological samples, helping laboratories deliver highly accurate data for a variety of clinically relevant analytes across a wide range of assays.
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