Medical centre joins innovation programme

Waters has added the metabolomics programme at Georgetown University Medical Centre to its Centers of Innovation programme. The programme supports scientists making breakthroughs in health and life science research, food safety, environmental protection and sports medicine.

“Professor Fornace and his laboratory have made important and highly-cited contributions to the understanding of key signalling events in cancer. His research in disease metabonomes and biomarker research is state of the art,” said Tim Riley, the director of the programme.

“The field of metabolomics has really taken off in the last six years or so,” said Professor Fornace, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the centre. “It’s a demanding area of science, and since quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry came on line, there has been an exponential increase in interest in metabolomics and the number of publications in this field. We are very pleased Waters has taken an interest in our research.”

Metabolomics data generated by the laboratory’s ACQUITY UPLC and Xevo G2 QTof LC–MS systems will contribute to the Georgetown Database of Cancer, a project that has compiled metabolomics data and other information from 4000 breast cancer patients to better predict the response to various cancer therapies based on patient’s genetic profiles.

For more information about the programme visit www.waters.com/waters/nav.htm?cid=10176245 and for more about Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center visit lombardi.georgetown.edu

This story originally appeared in The Column. Click here to view that issue.