Thermo Fisher Scientific Collaborating to Develop Advanced Analytical Workflows for Clinical Laboratories

Thermo Fisher Scientific and Cedars-Sinai, a non-profit academic healthcare organization, have entered into a collaboration to develop a pathway to precision medicine through the development of robust, reliable and sensitive liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based workflows for clinical research applications.

Bringing together Thermo Fisher’s LC-MS technology with the insights of Cedars-Sinai’s physicians and clinical research scientists, this initiative aims to provide clinical research laboratories with specific and sensitive LC-MS-based workflows that will deliver increased confidence in data while detecting and analyzing novel or known protein-based biomarkers within biological matrices.

Through their joint commitment, Thermo Fisher and Cedars-Sinai aim to develop a pathway to a future that includes precision medicine by:

• Developing robust data acquisition strategies for global plasma protein profiling and peptide selective reaction monitoring (SRM) assays for the direct analysis of plasma with or without enrichment.

• Optimizing quantitative intact protein analysis methods for plasma using Thermo Scientific Q Exactive Orbitrap mass spectrometer technology.

• Assessing targeted protein workflows with Thermo Scientific’s new generation Triple Quadrupole mass spectrometers for large quantitation assays within a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) environment.

“As the pathway to precision medicine advances in the lab, reliable and routine analytical workflows will be essential to quantify targeted and untargeted proteins and peptides in clinical samples with greater ease and sensitivity,” said Bradley Hart, senior director, clinical marketing, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher Scientific. “New LC-MS-based methods will be developed to deliver high quality and confident results regardless of user expertise and experience for laboratories seeking to identify novel biomarkers and monitor biotherapeutics, ultimately helping clinical research teams track and improve outcomes.”

Jennifer Van Eyk, Ph.D., principal investigator for research and director of the Advanced Clinical Biosystems Institute in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai, said, “Thermo Fisher shares our vision for helping clinical research teams set new standards for excellence and innovation in patient care through precision medicine. The goal is to develop advanced LC-MS-based workflows for the untargeted screening and targeted quantitation of protein-based biomarkers for critical disease states, which hold the potential to benefit not only our own patients, but also the wider clinical community.”