Thermo Fisher Scientific has held its first ever Faims (high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry) meeting in Germany.
Attendees presented a number of breakthroughs enabled through use of the Faims technology.
For example, Michael Blackburn, working with colleagues at Sanofi-aventis, described how Faims can be used to filter out matrix interferences from mass spectrometry data, leaving a cleaner signal and making it easier to validate bioanalytical methods used in drug development.
Faims enables researchers to store and fragment only ions of interest before introducing them into a mass spectrometer, thereby increasing the selectivity of an assay before mass analysis is performed.
By filtering out noise from sources such as drug dosing vehicles, drug metabolites and concomitantly administered medications (co-meds), the technique provides a better spectral quality than would be possible with liquid-chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) alone.
In studies performed using Thermo Fisher Scientific's Aria TLX-1 system powered by Turboflow technology, Blackburn has shown that interfering peaks due to co-meds can be removed using Faims.
The result is clean chromatographic peaks that are easy to integrate and provide clear indication of where the signal compound elutes.
In one analysis Blackburn showed that the use of Faims combined with a flow split leads to a signal that is 4.5 times larger and a signal-to-noise ratio that is 2,000 times better.
Faims technology attracts a diverse range of customers - pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations, agriculture/bioscience labs, universities and hospitals - and all of these were represented at the German event.
Members of the world anti-doping agency-accredited lab, Deutsche Sporthochschule, were also present at the event to learn and share experiences.
The question and answer sessions were interspersed with exchanges of information, anecdotes and experience.
Delegates came from Germany, UK, Denmark and Switzerland, and from companies such as AandM Labor, Roche and Sanofi-aventis.
Dr Axel Roemer, an expert in small molecule quantisation based at the German contract research organisation AandM Labor, presented the keynote lecture.
In it he described his company's efforts to improve protein and peptide analysis, and presented a validated method for peptide analysis using Faims-based LC-MS (LC-Faims-MS).
Using peptides in rat serum, Roemer and colleagues have shown that LC-Faims-MS chromatograms offer reduced chemical backgrounds compared to those produced without Faims.
By filtering out complex matrix interferences, which prevent method validation in a traditional LC-MS assay, Roemer reports lower limits of detection as small as 10ng/mL (100 times smaller than the 1ug/mL offered by other companies).
AandM Labor expects to have even better results at next year's meeting.
The goal of the event was to bring European Faims users and factory research representatives together to brainstorm, innovate and discuss ways of improving the selectivity of LC-MS/MS.
Session topics covered exploratory and discovery experiments, targeted small-molecule approaches and the quantisation of peptides and proteins.
Planning is underway for the next European Faims meeting.
