Pharmaceutical and Translational Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Bruker announces the new SCiLS Cloud and SCiLS Lab software solutions, now with MultiVendor Support (MVS), to bring innovative software features to mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) applications. MALDI Imaging has rapidly developed as a label-free technique for spatially resolved molecular analysis of proteins, glycans, lipids, as well as drugs and their metabolites. MALDI Imaging is finding rapidly increasing use in pharmaceutical drug development, in tissue-resolved biomarker research (e.g. glycans on cell surfaces as cancer markers), as well as in translational pathology research to complement immunohistochemistry (IHC).

The new SCiLS Cloud software offers web-based tools to facilitate distributed workflows, where data and analysis results can be shared, viewed and manipulated with a web browser through secure access. SCiLS Lab provides advanced and user-friendly solutions for data handling, visualization and computational analysis for Bruker MALDI imaging data sets, and now also offers support for data acquired from non-Bruker mass spectrometers.

Dr. Ron Heeren, Professor at the University of Maastricht and scientific director of the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging Institute (M4I), commented: “We use mass spectrometry imaging techniques at M4I with the aim to develop and apply mass spectrometry as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for personalized medicine in oncology, neurology and cardiovascular medicine. Powerful and user-friendly software is essential for mining the huge amount of data which is generated in MSI experiments. At M4I we already used SCiLS Lab for our Bruker MALDI Imaging system for years. We are now looking forward to expand SCiLS deployment to the entire lab and to our portfolio of mass-spec equipment.”