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

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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.