Thursday, May 5, 2011

Diagnostics news: SERI and the TripleTOF 5600 System

SERI selects AB SCIEX TripleTOF 5600 system to test chronic eye inflammations
April 20, 2011
AB SCIEX, a global leader in life science analytical technologies, today announced that the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI), an internationally known eye research center, will advance biomarker candidates it identified for chronic inflammatory eye conditions into large-scale clinical trials for validation with the AB SCIEX TripleTOF™ 5600 System. SERI plans to use the data from the TripleTOF™ system to accelerate the process to develop a clinical test to significantly improve understanding of inflammation of the eye. This information is expected to be invaluable in helping SERI develop methods with measurable end-points for improved diagnosis and pharmacological treatments of dry eye and other eye conditions that affect millions of people across the world.

Objective clinical tests to accurately measure the severity of dry eye syndrome and preclinical evaluation of new pharmacological therapies currently do not exist. As a leader in ocular proteomics studies, SERI is advancing eye research by identifying and verifying six biomarker candidates that are associated with dry eye syndrome. The institute is collaborating with Allergan, an ocular pharmaceutical company, to conduct a clinical trial with hundreds of patient samples to validate early data that these biomarkers show an accuracy rate close to 100 percent whether a person has dry eye.

SERI selected the AB SCIEX TripleTOF™ 5600 System for this important research because of the system's high throughput and high sensitivity coupled with high resolution and accurate mass. SERI is also using the Eksigent nanoLC-Ultra and cHiPLC-nanoflex chromatography technology to increase productivity and improve reproducibility. The researchers can utilize these technologies to generate better quality information from samples more easily than previously possible. With the TripleTOF™ system, SERI is expecting to complete the clinical trials in less than half the time it would take using other systems to collect research data.

Determining how the delicate epithelial cells on the surface of the cornea are affected by contact lenses is also not as well-understood as it could be, so the TripleTOF™ 5600 System, which provides high-performance quantitative and qualitative analysis with accurate mass, will be used for advanced metabolic research studies of contact lens wear. By studying the metabolomics of contact lens wear, the SERI researchers will be able to better understand how the cells on the surface of the cornea are affected by the type of lens as well as the length of time wearing the lens....

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