Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced that Jules Griffin has received an Agilent Thought Leader Award in recognition of his work in lipidomics.
This award includes an Agilent 6560 Ion Mobility Q-TOF LC/MS system, which Dr Griffin and his team will use to advance their lipid profiling of human tissues at the University of Cambridge.
The study of lipids and their functions is essential to understanding a number of pathologies and disorders, including diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis, fatty liver disease and cancer.
"The Agilent Thought Leader Award will catalyse our research into why certain lipid species are particularly toxic within the cell and how this gives rise to diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and fatty liver disease. Only now do we have the tools needed to examine lipids on an individual basis and we hope with ion mobility this will provide a new dimension of separation so we can really interrogate our model systems and patient samples" said Dr Griffin, who directs research into lipid profiling and signaling at the Department of Biochemistry and the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research Unit.
"We are pleased to contribute novel analytical capabilities to assist Dr Griffin and his lab to extend their research in obesity and fatty liver disease," said John Fjeldsted, who leads the group responsible for the ion mobility technology in the Agilent 6560 and who is also the executive sponsor of this award. "We believe Dr Griffin’s research will bring vital understanding to health challenges that have become all too prevalent in many populations."
Fjeldsted noted that the collaboration is also expected to yield new systems and software to benefit the broader clinical research community.
"The uniform field ion mobility separation capabilities of the 6560 greatly increase the amount of information one can collect in a single sample run," he said. "Working with Dr Griffin and his team, we’ll ascertain what new software tools we need to create to take advantage of the large volume of data that these studies produce."
The Agilent Thought Leader Award promotes fundamental scientific advances by contributing financial support, products and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in the life sciences, diagnostics and chemical analysis.