SWATH™ technology aims to enhance medical care
Research partnership hopes to use novel proteomic MS techniques to provide a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms.
A multi-year agreement has been signed by AB SCIEX and the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) to enhance medical care through the redefining of biomarker research. AB SCIEX will support the novel P4 medicine research carried out at ISB by leading scientists including Leroy Hood, winner of the National Medal of Science and Robert Moritz, ISB proteomics research director.
The ISB theory of P4 medicine is to gain a deeper insight into disease mechanisms in order to create medical care that displays the four ‘P’s; predictive, personalized, preventative and participatory. The project will combine analytical tools, workflows, databases and computational strategies.
Hood, ISB President and Co-founder commented on the novel concept, “With breakthroughs in translating research into clinical relevance, P4 medicine is expected to enable the creation of a virtual cloud of billions of data points around each individual as the basis for straightforward predictions about health and disease.”
An example of one of the workflows to be used in the research is a data-independent acquisition MS workflow, SWATH™ Acquisition. In a single run, this instrumentation can quantify the majority of peptides and proteins present in a complex sample. Hood commented on the technique, “SWATH is a game-changing technique that essentially acts as a protein microarray and is the most reproducible way to generate comprehensive quantitation of the entire proteome. It generates a digital record of the entire proteome that can be mined retrospectively for years to come.”
ISB aims to develop SWATH libraries that will be openly available to scientists across the globe, therefore, facilitating increased use of SWATH technology for other biological research. Moritz stated, “Having the proteomics data standardized across laboratories and across samples really enables us to quantitate entire proteomes at a level that hasn’t been done before. We aim to define markers that can predict whether a patient will respond to a certain treatment or not, and applying SWATH will play a big part in taking our advancements to another level. Not only can we now complement the breadth of genomics, but we will have the much-needed libraries and software development going forward to make data-sharing quite easier and standardized.”
AB SCIEX joined this collaboration through the AB SCIEX Academic Partnership program in order to allow for enhanced availability of novel technologies to omics researchers globally. ISB will utilize equipment produced by AB SCIEX such as the TripleTOF 5600+ system for SWATH Acquisition. President of AB SCIEX, Rainer Blair, commented on the collaboration, “Our collaboration with ISB will help drive SWATH into the mainstream of analytical science and make comprehensive, reproducible and simplified omics data more accessible to biologists around the world.”
