Clinical Mass Spectrometry: From Bench to Bedside and Back (Symposium)

Organized by Yu Zhou, this symposium will be held in Room 115C from 8:30 to 11:45 am. This set of presentations describes the application of mass spectrometry (MS) in laboratory medicine. The use of MS has revolutionized the delivery of health assessment, disease diagnosis, and treatment management. Advances in MS, proteomics, metabolomics, and molecular engineering provide valuable collaborations between analytical science and clinical science for solving clinical problems.

The first talk is presented at 8:35 am. The title is, “A Targeted Integrative Computational Pipeline to Assess Fecal Transplantation for the Treatment of Ulcerative Colitis.” Presented by Yu Zhou of the Cleveland Clinic, this lecture discusses metaproteomics and its qualitative and quantitative information of proteins, which when combined with a targeted integrative computational pipeline, provides the most clinically relevant information.

At 9:10 am the second talk of this symposium, titled, “Mass Spectrometric Innovations for Translational and Clinical Research,” is presented by Richard A. Yost of the University of Florida. This talk describes mass spectrometry as a dominant analytical technique for metabolomics. This lecture will address two of these areas of innovation, ion mobility separations and direct tissue analysis and imaging.

The third talk, entitled, “Quality Management of Clinical LC-MS Laboratories,” is presented at 9:45 am by Sihe Wang of Akron Children's Hospital. Given that the majority of LC–MS results are laboratory developed tests, there are unique quality assurance requirements. This talk will provide recommendations for quality management of LC–MS data based on CLIA'88, CLSI guidelines.

“MALDI TOF Mass Spectrometry in Clinical Microbiology Practice,” presented by Yi-Wei Tang of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will be given at 10:35 am. This fourth talk of the symposium will cover MS-based techniques, specifically matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) MS. The talk will discuss applications of these MS techniques within clinical microbiology practices.

The fifth and final talk of this symposium series, presented at 11:10 am, is titled, “Image MS of Tissue Biopsies to Assess Diagnosis, Prognosis and Response to Therapies.” The author is Pierre Chaurand of the University of Montreal. The topic of this lecture is the use of imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) for the analysis of biomolecules measured using thin tissue sections. MALDI IMS is now capable of cellular level spatial resolution of ≤10 µm spot size. Clinical examples of IMS technology will be described related to diagnosis, prognosis and response to therapy for several examples.