On this new episode of OMG OMx, Kate Stumpo speaks to Sapient’s Tanya Nguyen concerning the function of omics and mass spectrometry in neurosciences. Learn chosen highlights beneath, or watch the complete podcast:
Tanya Nguyen | OMG OMx Podcast | Ep. 10
Can you’re taking us by means of your omics background and the way you got here to embrace this discipline?
I’m a clinician scientist by coaching, specializing in neuropsychology and brain-behavior relationships. For a number of years, I used to be a professor at UC San Diego, attending the College Medical Heart. I used to be additionally a analysis college member and operated a medical analysis lab targeted on understanding biomarkers of neuroinflammation within the context of neuropsychiatric ailments.
My background differs barely from a lot of my colleagues within the omics space, offering me with a singular perspective on how we will apply omics to raised deal with medical human ailments, and a medical perspective on how it will finally influence affected person lives and outcomes.
How has your time within the medical house supplied you with new insights into doing analysis?
One of many issues I usually felt was lacking in my early preclinical analysis was the understanding of what occurs subsequent. How does this work translate into medical functions? How can I influence the lives of medical sufferers? Maybe this was as a result of I used to be younger and nonetheless an undergraduate with nice aspirations. This led me to shift my focus for my Ph.D. and pursue a medical diploma.
My Ph.D. was in neuropsychology. This was a singular analysis and mixed medical diploma, the place I not solely discovered an necessary methodology for conducting medical biomedical analysis but in addition grew to become clinically licensed to evaluate and deal with sufferers with issues I used to be researching.
Throughout my medical work, I used to be targeted on the evaluation and therapy of older adults with various kinds of psychological sicknesses. These primarily included main psychiatric ailments in addition to superior dementia syndromes.
As a part of my medical Ph.D. analysis, I additionally labored on tips on how to design and conduct randomized medical trials for dietary interventions. This constructed upon my undergraduate analysis on tips on how to enhance cognitive perform in sufferers with numerous teratological ailments—together with prenatal alcohol publicity, autism spectrum issues, and others.
Picture Credit score: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
Is there an OMG second that helped you begin the highway down science?
My “OMG” second occurred throughout my postdoctoral analysis. On the time, I got interested within the gut-brain axis. The microbiome was budding within the scientific analysis neighborhood throughout this time. Whereas extensively studied within the context of GI sickness, it was simply making its method into the sphere of neurodegenerative and neuropsychological ailments.
As a postdoc and an early profession college member, a number of my analysis was targeted on learning microbial-based biomarkers and the way they contribute to the pro-inflammatory milieu noticed in neuropsychiatric ailments. Whereas learning these microbes, I believed it necessary to know the metabolomics, metabolites, and lipids which can be created by these bugs.
I aimed to discover how these compounds influence downstream processes and work together with different threat elements and comorbid situations which may be current within the sufferers. That is once I started collaborating with our now co-founders at Sapient: Mo Jain, Jeramie Watrous, and Tao Lengthy.
How is mass spectrometry necessary within the broad omics discipline that you just concentrate on?
Mass spectrometry performs an necessary function in many various areas. Its performance is a software that may be utilized to many various functions. I feel that it’s agnostic to completely different ailments, and as talked about earlier, spans completely different levels of drug improvement.
From the early levels of discovery and understanding the mechanism of motion to focus on identification and validation, mass spectrometry proves invaluable. Its utility extends to extra patient-oriented functions like affected person stratification and medical trial enrichment.
That is what excites me as I’ve all the time been extra of a strategies know-how researcher. Whereas the illness is necessary, my focus has all the time been on exploring how instruments may be utilized to raised perceive completely different ailments.
As a scientist, it has been enjoyable to broaden my horizons and understanding of how completely different ailments work, how completely different interventions for various populations could differ, and having the ability to use the identical software to achieve completely different conclusions.
In regards to the speaker
Dr. Nguyen is a clinician-scientist with over 13 years of analysis expertise, having been principal investigator on quite a lot of Nationwide Institutes of Well being- and Basis-supported multi-site medical trials. Dr. Nguyen’s work has leveraged multi-omics discovery inside the context of human biosampling to uncover new biomarkers for illness prognosis and therapy. At Sapient, Dr. Nguyen acts as a liaison between scientific, enterprise, and operational groups overseeing key buyer relationships and partnerships.
omg OMx host: Kate Stumpo, Senior Market Supervisor at Bruker
About Bruker Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry
Uncover new methods to use mass spectrometry to at this time’s most urgent analytical challenges. Improvements equivalent to Trapped Ion Mobility (TIMS), smartbeam and scanning lasers for MALDI-MS Imaging that ship true pixel constancy, and eXtreme Decision FTMS (XR) know-how succesful to disclose Isotopic High quality Construction (IFS) signatures are pushing scientific exploration to new heights. Bruker‘s mass spectrometry options allow scientists to make breakthrough discoveries and achieve deeper insights.
