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

沃里克大学衍生出来的Verdel仪器有限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。这使用了一种称为全相关质谱（TOC-MS）的新技术，允许用户同时对大范围的分子进行片段化，同时跟踪哪些片段来自哪些前体分子。由于TOC-MS同时对所有化合物并行进行这些碎片化研究，而不是一次对一种化合物进行连续的碎片化研究，因此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，其速度足以在几秒钟内提供这些全面的碎片数据集。TOC-MS可以应用于不同的领域，目前的重点是脂质分析，以便对帕金森病、阿尔茨海默病以及癌症和代谢疾病进行更详细的研究。脂类是人体中广泛而重要的一类化学物质，从激素到脂蛋白都有。TOC-MS还将在更广泛的蛋白质组学领域发挥重要作用，例如，能够测量血液中的所有蛋白质并一次诊断多种疾病。此外，通过识别癌症突变的表达（或表达不足）蛋白，这项技术可能成为精准医疗的关键启用工具。更广泛地说，这项技术代表了几乎所有质谱仪应用中性能的一个步骤变化，其中存在复杂的混合物，并且每次分析将产生的额外信息可以在食品和制药行业以及非法药物中提供丰富的来源指纹。该项目将在12-18个月内将实验室演示设计转化为可生产的仪器，并销售给客户。

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.