Mass spectrometry is becoming a cutting edge technology in the fields of clinical diagnostics and personalized medicine. A key application is the quantification and/or assessment of fold changes of molecules derived from primary and secondary metabolism. Samples derived from human origin contain a wide variety of metabolites at a wide range of concentrations, additionally the matrix (e.g. blood) is often very complex. Therefore, quantification and quality control is often laborious and inefficient due to matrix effects and saturation of the detector. In order to avoid these effects, mass spectrometry techniques usually relies on the use of isotopically-labelled internal standards. However, these are frequently based on organic synthesis, entailing noxious reagents and dedicated protocols for each amino acid, or in vivo synthesis, yielding a very low content of amino acids.
ISOtopic solutions uses a new approach to obtain isotopically-labelled internal standards in-vivo. Cells are grown on an isotopically enriched 13C growth media. These cells can be harvested and extracted to obtain an isotopically enriched extract of the metabolome that can be exploited as internal standard for a plethora of metabolites. The internal standards produced by this method have a labelling degree greater than 99%, and are extremely clear and clean. Therefore, they are suited to precise quantification and assessment of metabolites using mass spectrometry.
The isotopically-labelled internal standards increase measurement accuracy by eliminating measurement errors, and reduce costs by simplification of workflows.
Patent protection applied for.