Innovation Award for Integrated Metabolomics Systems

ESA Biosciences announced that it has received the 2008 Frost & Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of integrated metabolomics systems. Frost & Sullivan presented the award to ESA’s Vice President of HPLC Products and Services, Dr. Ian Acworth, at the 2008 Growth Excellence Awards banquet on September 16, 2008, in San Francisco, California. According to Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst, Sandhya Kamath, ESA is being honoured for its leadership in developing an integrated platform based on HPLC with electrochemical-array detection, alone, or in parallel with mass spectrometry. “The Frost & Sullivan Innovation Award comes as ESA is completing metabolomics work made possible by a grant from the National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research initiative (awarded in 2005),” said ESA’s Dr. Acworth. “Our studies show that EC-Array and MS are complementary in
nature, and the combined use of two sensitive and selective detection techniques can provide greater coverage of the metabolome than either technique alone. This can be very useful in new FDA-mandated drug safety testing to evaluate active/toxic human drug metabolites.

Studies have shown that drugs can metabolise differently in humans than in other animals, resulting in potentially toxic levels of drug metabolites that can’t be identified by animal studies alone. Electrochemical detection in line with mass spectrometry streamlines the metabolite analysis, synthesis, and evaluation process.

In order to determine the clinically relevant metabolite levels in human plasma/tissues, metabolites can be synthesised and identified and then matched to what’s seen in relevant animal studies. When the appropriate metabolites are identified, scale-up can be done for clinical trials to evaluate metabolite toxicity in humans.”