Thermo Fisher Scientific and UC Davis launch center of excellence in clinical metabolomics

Thermo Fisher Scientific and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) West Coast Metabolomics Center has announced The Center of Excellence in Clinical Metabolomics, a research collaboration to provide the metabolomics community with innovations, best practices and standard operating procedures to support the rapid scale-up of large cohort studies and clinical research.

Metabolomics is an increasingly important field where researchers identify diagnostic biomarkers for disease, discover new drug targets, develop tools to predict drug response, and enable precision medicine overall. Advancements in this area can help ensure that patients receive more targeted medicines and increase the likelihood those therapies will achieve their intended outcomes.

The Center of Excellence in Clinical Metabolomics, based on the UC Davis Sacramento campus, will enable targeted and untargeted metabolic profiling for large-scale population-based cohorts across translational research and precision medicine. The Center will develop standardized processes for the research community, including end-to-end metabolic profiling workflows; optimized liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) methods, protocols for analytical controls to monitor instrument performance; and training courses for metabolomics staff, scientists and core lab managers.

"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," said Mark Stevenson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Thermo Fisher. "The work we’ll do here serves science by refining basic, but critical scientific techniques for metabolomics so they can quickly become clinically relevant."

As part of the collaboration, Thermo Fisher is providing its powerful Orbitrap technology. The Center will generate high-quality data using the latest generation of Orbitrap-based mass spectrometers in conjunction with the Thermo Scientific Vanquish Duo UHPLC system for increased throughput. This instrument combination will support the development of streamlined workflows for large-scale studies and translational research.

"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," said Oliver Fiehn, director, West Coast Metabolomics Center at the UC Davis Genome Center. "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."

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