How do mass spectrometry and omics impression neurosciences?

Can you’re taking us via 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 Middle. I used to be additionally a analysis school member and operated a medical analysis lab targeted on understanding biomarkers of neuroinflammation within the context of neuropsychiatric illnesses.

My background differs barely from a lot of my colleagues within the omics space, offering me with a singular perspective on how we will apply omics to raised deal with medical human illnesses, and a medical perspective on how this can finally impression affected person lives and outcomes.

How has your time within the medical house supplied you with new insights into doing analysis?

One of many issues I typically felt was lacking in my early preclinical analysis was the understanding of what occurs subsequent. How does this work translate into medical purposes? How can I impression 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 singular analysis and mixed medical diploma, the place I not solely realized an necessary methodology for conducting medical biomedical analysis but additionally grew to become clinically licensed to evaluate and deal with sufferers with issues I used to be researching.

Throughout my medical work, I used to be targeted on the evaluation and remedy of older adults with several types of psychological sicknesses. 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 one can design and conduct randomized medical trials for dietary interventions. This constructed upon my undergraduate analysis on how one can enhance cognitive perform in sufferers with numerous teratological illnesses—together with prenatal alcohol publicity, autism spectrum issues, and others.

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

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

As a postdoc and an early profession school member, a number of my analysis was targeted on finding out microbial-based biomarkers and the way they contribute to the pro-inflammatory milieu noticed in neuropsychiatric illnesses. Whereas finding out these microbes, I believed it necessary to grasp the metabolomics, metabolites, and lipids which are created by these bugs.

I aimed to discover how these compounds impression downstream processes and work together with different threat components and comorbid situations that could be current within the sufferers. That is once 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 position in many various areas. Its performance is a device that may be utilized to many various purposes. I feel 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 purposes like affected person stratification and medical trial enrichment.

That is what excites me as I’ve at all times been extra of a strategies expertise researcher. Whereas the illness is necessary, my focus has at all times been on exploring how instruments could 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 fluctuate, and having the ability to use the identical device to succeed in totally different conclusions.

In regards to the speaker

Dr. Nguyen is a clinician-scientist with over 13 years of analysis expertise, having been principal investigator on a variety 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 analysis and remedy. At Sapient, Dr. Nguyen acts as a liaison between scientific, enterprise, and operational groups overseeing key buyer relationships and partnerships.

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