AB SCIEX Academic Partnership Program Funds University of Texas Southwestern Researcher

This is the first grant awarded to an academic researcher as part of the AB SCIEX Academic Partnership Program,  which was launched earlier this year. This grant aims to help Dr. McDonald accelerate advancements toward the realization of personalized medicine.

AB SCIEX selected Dr. McDonald as the program’s first grant winner because of the breakthrough work he is doing to advance lipidomics and metabolomics. Dr. McDonald is a leader in the field of lipidomics, and his work includes directing the mass spectrometry branch of the LIPID MAPS Sterol Core where they recently concluded a sterolomic analysis of the Dallas Heart Study, a 3200+ human subject cohort.

Dr. McDonald has ongoing collaborations with Phil Sanders, a senior research scientist at a leading pharmaceutical company, who pioneered direct infusion techniques using the TripleTOF 5600 platform, which will be the basis for the work at UT Southwestern. With access to extensive collections of biological samples at UT Southwestern, this academic researcher sees an opportunity for significant discoveries. Ultimately, lipidomic and metabolomic analysis of human samples will elucidate new understanding of disease states that will help in the development of treatments of metabolic diseases, such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

Prior to the grant from AB SCIEX, the team at UT was limited in what they could achieve in infusion-based lipidomics research and unable to apply the workflows that Sanders had developed. Funding to acquire the instrument had been a major challenge for Dr. McDonald and his team, who have been focused on lipidomics for the past eight years. The answer was AB SCIEX’s program for academics.

“The AB SCIEX Academic Partnership program cleared the way for us to bring on campus the TripleTOF 5600+ system, which is exactly the technology needed by the lipid field to advance the study of lipidomics,” said Jeff McDonald, Associate Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “AB SCIEX instrumentation is second to none, especially the Turbo V ion source, which is tough as nails and allows us to do things that simply cannot be done on other instruments. We wouldn’t have the latest innovations in mass spectrometry at UT Southwestern if not for the company’s academic partnership program. We appreciate and value AB SCIEX’s support for academic research.”