FlowChip: Where Proteomics Standards Meets Metabolomics

March 2, 2022 – Littleton, MA (USA) New Objective, Inc., a market leader in innovative solutions for nanoflow and microflow LC-MS, launches a consortium focused on establishing FlowChip, an integrated solution for microflow LC-MS as a standard platform for metabolomics. Mike Lee, CEO of New Objective and founder of the CPSA Annual meetings together with Emily Ehrenfeld, President and co-founder of New Objective, hosted colleagues from New Objective together with Rafael Melani, Kelleher Research Group at Northwestern University, along with leaders across industry representing pharmaceutical, biotechnology and clinical research organizations. Building on the integration of FlowChip as the standard solution for Top-Down Proteomics, the consortium has come together to translate the validation process recently completed for intact protein analysis, to metabolomics.

Mike launched the meeting unifying everyone on a personal level and the awareness and understanding that whether we are patients ourselves or intimately connected with a patient, we have an opportunity to make a difference by moving the current paradigm of care to a proactive model through standardization. He emphasized, as analysts, we often focus on reproducibility last – seeking perfection – until the requirement of real-time decision-making pushes us to implement the reproducibility required for clinically relevant longitudinal and long-term studies. Mike shared personal experiences with the commercialization of the triple quad LC-MS in pharmaceutical research and development during his tenure at Bristol Myers Squibb – a now industry-wide standard – as its prevalence in industrial LC-MS analysis has been driven by the requirement for reproducible quantitative results for long-term studies.

Rafael together with Helena Svobodova, New Objective, shared recent experiences evaluating FlowChip for intact protein analysis, a study which was launched in February 2021 concluding within four months establishing FlowChip as the validated standard solution for Top-Down Proteomic analysis at Northwestern. The evaluation was built on a framework of three different standards, each with increasing depth and complexity used for Bottom-Up Proteomics and extended to Top-Down Proteomics, with each sample validating the platform and further demonstrating the ability to analyze samples – an iterative process, getting closer to the patient with each successive step. Today’s meeting marks the formal launch to repeat the evaluation process for Metabolomics, starting with the fungal metabolome. Helena Svobodova together with Romi Elfakih of New Objective will be working together with Rafael to launch the evaluation process at Northwestern, integrating the FlowChip microflow solution into existing workflows for the identification of novel metabolites via mass spectrometry-based metabolomics in fungi at Northwestern. Working together with the community assembled today, New Objective looks to extend this validation of FlowChip for the identification of novel metabolites in fungi, to human samples.