Mass spec studio software for the pharmaceutical market - a phase one project

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Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on powerful new technology for life science research, onlyto discover that you cannot fully use the data that it produces. This is a situation in a large number of academicand industry laboratories that have purchased mass spectrometers for R&D spanning all areas of biological andenvironmental sciences. New technologies in mass spectrometry have spurred tremendous growth in newmethods for compound characterization, especially in the biopharmaceuticals industry. Biopharmaceuticals areprotein drugs. They represent a very effective class of pharmaceutical agents and the area is experiencing ahigh rate of growth worldwide. Mass spectrometry is the perfect choice of technology to support thedevelopment of new protein drugs, and to ensure that these complicated drugs are safe to use. The companiesthat make mass spectrometers are not able to keep up with the many new directions that biopharmaceuticalcompanies are taking mass spectrometry, and the situation is expected to deteriorate further. We developed atransformative solution to this problem, in the form of an application-building software platform called theMass Spec Studio. This platform strongly reduces the development time for creating new applications. It iscurrently houses research-grade plug-ins that are very useful for a form of protein characterization calledhigher-order structure (HOS) analysis. In this project we will complete version 2 of the Mass Spec Studio. Itwill contain industry-leading plug-ins for HOS analysis and streamline the application development processeven further. The goal of the project is to create a package of technologies that will help mass spectrometrykeep pace with the needs of the biopharmaceutical industry, and ensure that protein drugs are effective andsafe.