Grant: Industrial Research Chairs

This proposal is for renewal of a third term of the NSERC / MDS Analytical Technologies Industrial Research Chair in Analytical Mass Spectrometry. This IRC conducts research in developing novel hardware in mass spectrometry (MS) and applications in collaboration with MDS Analytical Technologies (AT, formerly SCIEX), the Industrial Partner. This proposal for renewal comprises ongoing collaborative projects and new projects developed with MDS AT. As in current practice, many of these projects will be carried out in both the Chair's laboratories in York University and his collaborators' laboratories in MDS AT. Siu's graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and MDS AT staff will be able to conduct research in both locations, facilitated by the short physical separation (-15 minutes by car) between the two collaborating institutions. A significant portion of the Chair's research program will be devoted to understanding and developing of new ion dissociation methods and instrumentation. These include infrared multiphoton dissociation, implemented for the first time in a hybrid quadrupole / time-of-flight (QqTOF) mass spectrometer (a prototype of the MDS AT QSTAR) by the Chair's team; and ultraviolet dissociation, a new project whose preliminary data show considerable promise. Results of this research will lead to a better understanding of the potential of these dissociation methods for implementation on the QqTOF and other types of MS/MS instrumentation that are manufactured by MDS AT, and may lead to commercial products. Equally significant are projects devoted to better quantitative analyses of peptide and small-molecule drugs. These projects include investigations into multiple-reaction monitoring, the use of a differential mobility analyzer and the enhanced multiply charge scan for improved selectivity in fast separations, and ion parking for simplifying ion distributions from the perspective of enhancing quantification. In addition, efforts will be devoted to apply ion mobility spectrometry in a novel instrumentation developed during the second Chair term that integrates ion mobility and triple quadrupole MS for drug metabolite characterization that complements MS.