Metabolomics
Metabolomics is a fundamental study of physiological functions involving metabolites. As metabolic profiling provides chemical fingerprints from cellular processes that is linked to physiological change, comprehensive analysis of metabolites from biological samples is in demand. Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics is one of the most actively progressed techniques to identify and quantify metabolites due to their selectivity and sensitivity. We aim to perform qualitative and quantitative analysis of drug-like molecule and their metabolites by ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS), collision induced dissociation (CID), and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) imaging. Ultimately, our efforts may enable the tracking of dynamic change of specific metabolites in tissues, which can be expanded to general pharmacokinetics and study of drug resistance.
Pharmaceutical industry has been struggling over several decades from unsuccessful drug activity during clinical trial phase or even after the drug approval. Drug resistance is one of the most common problems in failure of the drugs. Profiling drug metabolites is essential for understanding the drug metabolism in the body for further enhancement in the drug efficiency and applicability. About 75% of the total drug metabolisms are majorly driven by cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYPs). Therefore, understanding the metabolites from CYPs are important in studying pharmacokinetics of the drugs. However, the analysis of metabolite isomers are still challenging. We are interested in separation and characterization of drugs and their metabolites by utilizing IM-MS and CID, which are known as general tools that can provide isomeric separation of drug-like molecules and unique fragmentation fingerprint of isomers, respectively.