Bringing to market an innovative, new mass spectrometer for rapid, robust, and detailed data on all components in complex mixtures

Verdel仪器有限公司是沃里克大学的子公司，正在开发一项创新的专利技术，该技术将使科学家能够同时获得数千种分子化合物的详细结构信息。这使用了一种称为总相关质谱（TOC-MS）的新技术，允许用户同时对各种分子进行碎片化，同时跟踪哪些碎片来自哪些前体分子。由于TOC-MS同时对所有化合物进行这些碎片化研究，而不是一次一个化合物地进行这些碎片化研究，这大大加快了实验速度。Verdel正在开发一种类似于常规台式仪器的产品，该产品的速度足以在几秒钟内提供这些全面的碎片化数据集。TOC-MS可以应用于不同的领域，目前的重点是脂质分析，以使更详细的研究帕金森氏症，阿尔茨海默氏症以及癌症和代谢疾病。脂质是人体内广泛而重要的一类化学物质，从激素到脂蛋白。TOC-MS还将在更广泛的蛋白质组学领域发挥重要作用，例如，能够一次性测量血液中的所有蛋白质并诊断多种疾病。此外，通过识别所表达的（或表达不足）的蛋白质，比如癌症突变，这项技术可能是精准医学的关键工具。更广泛地说，该技术代表了几乎所有质谱应用的性能的一个阶跃变化，其中存在复杂的混合物，并且每次分析将产生的附加信息可以提供食品和制药工业中丰富的来源指纹该项目将把实验室演示器设计转化为生产就绪的仪器，在12-18个月内向客户销售。

Verdel Instruments Ltd, a University of Warwick spin-out, is developing an innovative and patented technology which will allow scientists to obtain detailed structural information for thousands of molecular compounds simultaneously. This uses a new technique called Total Correlation Mass Spectrometry (TOC-MS) that allows a user to fragment a wide range of molecules simultaneously and, at the same time, track which fragments come from which precursor molecules. Because TOC-MS performs these fragmentation studies in parallel on all compounds at once, rather than serially one compound at a time, it greatly speeds up the experiment.Verdel is developing a product akin to a routine benchtop instrument which will be fast enough to provide these comprehensive fragmentation datasets in a few seconds.TOC-MS can be applied across diverse areas, with current focus on lipid analysis to enable more detailed research into Parkinson's, Alzheimer's as well as cancer and metabolic diseases. Lipids are a wide and important class of chemical in the body ranging from hormones to lipoproteins.TOC-MS will also play an important role in the wider field of Proteomics, for example, the ability to measure all proteins in blood and to diagnose a wide range of diseases in one go. Further, by identifying the expressed (or under expressed) proteins of say cancer mutations, this technique could be a key enabling tool for precision medicine.More widely, this technology represents a step change in performance for almost all Mass Spec applications where there are complex mixtures and the additional information which will be produced with each analysis can provide a rich fingerprint of origin in the food and pharmaceutical industries as well as illegal drugs.This project will take the laboratory demonstrator design into a production-ready instrument for sale to customers over 12-18 months.