Ultrafast acoustic ejection for biomarker studies!

 

Acoustic Ejection mass spec is super promising, right? You couple an Echo which can accurately transfer liquid from one place to another to the front of a mass spec where a droplet gets moved ionized, quantified and moves to the next. Dr. Wheeler, who graduated from our group recently had an internship at Merck where she ran one. She said that you couldn't prepare samples fast enough for it even if you were loading 1526 well plates! I think most of the systems are ending up doing drug screens in pharma.

Could you use it for biomarker studies in humans? Get those big cohorts done over your lunch break? Sure looks like it! (link!)

You aren't getting any upfront separation from HPLC, so this group used ...affinity... enrichment.... so they enriched with antibodies then did really nice super ultra fast quantification on the echo. By blog rules I am required to be snide about the use of rabbit blood derivatives to mess up the quantitative nature of a proteomics assay.

However - 

This automated platform for affinity enrichment was put through a rigorous validation for both robustness and reproducibility. It's clearly thorough because I nearly fell asleep twice trying to read it. The highest %CV in the study appears to be a shockingly low 11%? 

If nothing else this is the first study I've seen that says the Echo equipped triple quad can be a legitimate contributor in proteomic validation.