Avi Thomas adjusts the bioAMS instrument. Photo: Jacqueline McBride/LLNL |
Researchers
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently received $3 million from the
National Institutes of Health to acquire a new biomedical accelerator mass spectrometry
(bioAMS) instrument.
The
instrument will provide faster analysis for medical and other biological
research.
Historically,
no matter what form a biological sample started out in, it had to be converted
to graphite before being analyzed in an accelerator. The traditional AMS
technology required operation by experts in disciplines far removed from
medical fields, unforgiving special chemistries to prepare samples for analysis,
and extensive time required for that sample preparation—all factors that have
impacted its utility for clinical researchers.
However,
in recent years, LLNL investments have allowed researchers to develop an
interface that would handle liquid samples and bypass the graphitization
process. The new bioAMS instrument will couple with this transformational
technological development to rapidly and cheaply perform biomedical human
subject tracer studies and body burden assessment addressing important
questions in nutrition, toxicology, pharmacology, drug development, and
comparative medicine.
The
instrument also will support LLNL’s biological detection and medical
countermeasures programs. Examples of applications include dating of cancer
stem cells, developing individualized patient therapies, and rapid testing of
new therapeutics against infectious agents.
“AMS
fills a special niche in the biomedical field because it can measure very low
concentrations of drugs with extreme accuracy, and that’s important for helping
to understand how biology works. However, its real utility hasn’t been fully
utilized because of a variety of difficulties,” says Ken Turteltaub, principal
investigator (PI) of the NIH award and leader of the Lab’s bioAMS efforts.
“This new technology really moves AMS to the next level.”
“In
addition,” says Ted Ognibene, co-PI of the NIH award, “the new
instrument will shrink the standard sample size from half a milligram down to
sub microgram levels. This drastically reduced sample size will allow
researchers to better match the biological requirements of the experiment with
the analytical capabilities of the instrument and open new fields of scientific
inquiry that were previously closed with the graphitization approach.”
These
technological advances were driven by the specific needs of the biomedical
community, according to Graham Bench, director of the Center for Accelerator
Mass Spectrometry (CAMS). LLNL’s National Resource for Biomedical Accelerator
Mass Spectrometry works with more than 60 entities around the world on various
studies.
“We’ve
held workshops in the past two years for some of our major collaborators, and
the number one technological request has been a more user-friendly front end to
the instrumentation. They get valuable data out of the AMS, but the sample
preparation process is a rather cumbersome step,” Bench says. “We’ve
listened to their requests in developing this instrument, because the end game
is that they will be able to harness the technology much more
effectively.”
The
new instrument will be the first AMS system at LLNL not housed in CAMS. Rather,
it will be deliberately sited in the Lab’s bioAMS experimental suite as part of
the effort to move the technology out of expert accelerator laboratories into
more routine biomedical laboratory settings. LLNL researchers will work to
develop and validate the instrument with the goal of deploying the technology
to general clinical laboratories in approximately five years.
LLNL’s
expertise in developing these types of technologies is why the instrument is
sited at the Lab, Bench says.
“Livermore invented the
field of biomedical AMS, we hold the patents, we are the world leaders,”
he says. “People come to us for advice and regard what we do as the gold
standard for bioAMS. We’ve always had a reputation of being technologically
innovative and they are relying on us to deliver on that yet again.”