New mass spectrometers speed up medical research
Mr Murphy, right, Head of Biochemistry Professor Nick Hoogenraad, and research assistant Ms Fiona Duran.
The search for new drugs to treat cancer and auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis will accelerate following the recent installation of a $2 million suite of five mass spectrometers on La Trobe University’s main Melbourne campus at Bundoora.
Housed in the Molecular Sciences laboratories, the highly sensitive machines offer researchers at La Trobe and the Bundoorabased Cooperative Research Centre for Biomarker Translation (CRC BT) access to some of the world’s most advanced processes for identifying key fundamental proteins and determining their role in disease. The facility is expected to more than quadruple current capacity.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Tim Brown says the choice of equipment reflects a twelve-month global search for instruments offering multiple but complementary applications. ‘We looked at every major supplier of proteomic instrumentation around the globe and asked them to test our complex protein samples. Usually you get high accuracy or high throughput. The gold standard is to try to have equipment that does both. These machines approach that,’ he says.
Like a prism that separates light into its component wavelengths, mass spectrometers separate, detect and digitise ions generated in a mass analyser from sample molecules, yielding data on the molecular weight and abundance of the molecule in a sample. They determine the mass of a molecule by measuring the mass-to-charge ratio of its ions, with each piece of equipment offering one or more sophisticated methods for achieving this end.
Data generated on protein molecules particularly hold promise for CRC BT researchers at La Trobe and their partners at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, the Women and Children Research Institute in Adelaide, the Institute for Medical and Veterinary Sciences in Adelaide and the Mater Medical Research Institute and Mater Health Services in Brisbane.
These collaborators and their commercial partners, Amgen and BD Biosciences from the USA, seek to identify and profile hundreds or perhaps thousands of unknown ‘biomarkers’ for specific diseases including cancer and auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Mass Spectrometry Facility Manager Mr Vince Murphy says: ‘Some cancers are explained by DNA damage or DNA mutation, but not all of them. A lot are due to inappropriate expression of cell surface proteins that control the proliferation of cells. There may be underlying genetics but it’s really about regulation at the protein level, and that’s what we’re looking at with this equipment.’
Mr Murphy says the facility will be invaluable for the large body of molecular research being carried out in the University’s Biochemistry and Chemistry departments and for collaborative or commercial research by researchers outside the University.