Technology partnership to tackle society’s big challenges

The University of Western Australia (UWA) has teamed up with measurement technology company Agilent Technologies, committing to a five-year collaboration that will enable the development of groundbreaking applications in life sciences.

The partnership will contribute to UWA’s local, national and international research and teaching alliances through the Centre of Metabolomics, The ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the UWA Comparative Analysis of Biomolecular Networks Research and Training Centre. The centres have agreed to put Agilent platform technologies and applications to the test in an effort to advance international training opportunities while furthering research into some of society’s big challenges in health, food production and the environment.

Through its Agilent Global Academia Program, Agilent has already donated a high-resolution mass spectrometer, used to provide accurate metabolomic analysis of molecules in complex samples, as well as cash grants, as part of the collaboration. Researchers are excited at the opportunity of a big increase in capability in areas of research including drug discovery and metabolism, innovative pathway mapping in diseases such as cancer and diabetes, environmental pollution characterisation, food analysis and disease biomarker discovery.

Metabolomics is the analysis of metabolites (the products of a metabolic reaction) in biological samples and this type of analysis is provided for researchers by the UWA Centre for Metabolomics. The centre supports biological research from many disciplines including plant, animal and medical sciences. Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Director of the centre, welcomed the arrival of the critical new infrastructure to UWA.

“It will provide cutting-edge metabolomics technology for use by many researchers in diverse areas throughout UWA and the state,” he said.

Liver cancer researcher Professor George Yeoh explained that the new LC-QTOF mass spectrometer will help to identify pathway targets that can be used against cancer cells, as well as for monitoring outcomes of strategies to control cancer cells.

“We expect that many pathways that have been implicated in tumour development will be more accurately and comprehensively assessed for the first time,” he said.

Rod Minett, General Manager Life Sciences, South Asia Pacific and Korea at Agilent, said the company had formed a strong partnership with the national Metabolomics Australia network and with researchers at UWA.

“We see real benefit in supporting the UWA Centre for Metabolomics to provide the best quality metabolomics analysis to assist researchers,” he said.

“The LC-QTOF will give this centre advanced capability and allow the development of new applications to measure small molecules in many areas including biomedical science, environmental science, plant and oceans research.”

Agilent will provide additional assistance to the centre to support researchers through its experienced applications specialists located in Australia and overseas.