Advancing Health: From Wellness to Submicrometer Particles

The HPLC 2016 conference kicks off this afternoon with plenary lectures that focus on human health, spanning from the big picture of wellness to the details of characterizing monoclonal antibodies.

Leroy Hood, famous for his work advancing biology, from the genome to systems biology, will lead with a view of the big picture, in a talk about transforming healthcare through wellness. He believes that four converging movements-systems medicine, big data and its analytics, the digitalization of personal measurements, and patient-activated social networks-are leading to medicine that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory (P4). This “P4” approach to medicine, Hood predicts, will lead to an emerging discipline of “scientific wellness.” Scientific wellness, Hood argues, will in turn allow individuals to optimize their physiological and psychological wellness and will allow scientists to identify the earliest transitions from wellness to disease for common diseases.

Steven Carr of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will then provide perspectives that also embrace the big picture of biology, chemistry, and medicine, but with a focus on analytical methods. He will discuss how high-resolution liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry-based proteomics is advancing these fields and will present the results of recent studies that convey a sense of the breadth and depth of application of modern proteomics to biology and medicine.

Mary Wirth of Purdue University will wrap up the plenary with a talk focusing on details, looking at a point where medicine and chromatography meet: characterizing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies and antibody–drug conjugates using submicrometer chromatography particles. In particular, she will discuss the the role of novel bonded phases for improving reversed-phase, ion-exchange, and hydrophobic-interaction chromatography separations.

The plenary session begins at 4:30 pm in the Golden Gate Ballroom, on the B2 level.