How do mass spectrometry and omics influence neurosciences?

Can you are taking us by your omics background and the way you got here to embrace this area?

I’m a clinician scientist by coaching, specializing in neuropsychology and brain-behavior relationships. For a number of years, I used to be a professor at UC San Diego, attending the College Medical Heart. I used to be additionally a analysis college member and operated a medical analysis lab centered on understanding biomarkers of neuroinflammation within the context of neuropsychiatric illnesses.

My background differs barely from lots of my colleagues within the omics space, offering me with a novel perspective on how we are able to apply omics to raised deal with medical human illnesses, and a medical perspective on how this can ultimately influence affected person lives and outcomes.

How has your time within the medical area offered you with new insights into doing analysis?

One of many issues I usually felt was lacking in my early preclinical analysis was the understanding of what occurs subsequent. How does this work translate into medical functions? How can I influence the lives of medical sufferers? Maybe this was as a result of I used to be younger and nonetheless an undergraduate with nice aspirations. This led me to shift my focus for my Ph.D. and pursue a medical diploma.

My Ph.D. was in neuropsychology. This was a novel analysis and mixed medical diploma, the place I not solely realized an necessary methodology for conducting medical biomedical analysis but additionally turned clinically licensed to evaluate and deal with sufferers with issues I used to be researching.

Throughout my medical work, I used to be centered on the evaluation and therapy of older adults with various kinds of psychological diseases. These primarily included main psychiatric illnesses in addition to superior dementia syndromes.

As a part of my medical Ph.D. analysis, I additionally labored on how you can design and conduct randomized medical trials for dietary interventions. This constructed upon my undergraduate analysis on how you can enhance cognitive perform in sufferers with varied teratological illnesses—together with prenatal alcohol publicity, autism spectrum issues, and others.

Is there an OMG second that helped you begin the highway down science?

My “OMG” second occurred throughout my postdoctoral analysis. On the time, I took an interest within the gut-brain axis. The microbiome was budding within the scientific analysis group throughout this time. Whereas extensively studied within the context of GI sickness, it was simply making its means into the sphere of neurodegenerative and neuropsychological illnesses.

As a postdoc and an early profession college member, a variety of my analysis was centered on learning microbial-based biomarkers and the way they contribute to the pro-inflammatory milieu noticed in neuropsychiatric illnesses. Whereas learning these microbes, I assumed it necessary to grasp the metabolomics, metabolites, and lipids which might be created by these bugs.

I aimed to discover how these compounds influence downstream processes and work together with different danger elements and comorbid situations that could be current within the sufferers. That is after I started collaborating with our now co-founders at Sapient: Mo Jain, Jeramie Watrous, and Tao Lengthy.

How is mass spectrometry necessary within the broad omics area that you simply specialise in?

Mass spectrometry performs an necessary function in many alternative areas. Its performance is a instrument that may be utilized to many alternative functions. I believe that it’s agnostic to totally different illnesses, and as talked about earlier, spans totally different levels of drug improvement.

From the early levels of discovery and understanding the mechanism of motion to focus on identification and validation, mass spectrometry proves invaluable. Its utility extends to extra patient-oriented functions like affected person stratification and medical trial enrichment.

That is what excites me as I’ve at all times been extra of a strategies know-how researcher. Whereas the illness is necessary, my focus has at all times been on exploring how instruments will be utilized to raised perceive totally different illnesses.

As a scientist, it has been enjoyable to broaden my horizons and understanding of how totally different illnesses work, how totally different interventions for various populations could range, and having the ability to use the identical instrument to succeed in totally different conclusions.

Concerning the speaker

Dr. Nguyen is a clinician-scientist with over 13 years of analysis expertise, having been principal investigator on plenty of Nationwide Institutes of Well being- and Basis-supported multi-site medical trials. Dr. Nguyen’s work has leveraged multi-omics discovery inside the context of human biosampling to uncover new biomarkers for illness prognosis and therapy. At Sapient, Dr. Nguyen acts as a liaison between scientific, enterprise, and operational groups overseeing key buyer relationships and partnerships.

omg OMx host: Kate Stumpo, Senior Market Supervisor at Bruker

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