MSACL Presenter Biography

Preeti Purwaha
Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Bio

Educational/research background: I am currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX since Oct 2011. My goal is to develop and validate mass spectrometry based assays for quantitative analysis of metabolites and small molecules to search for novel targets of L-asparaginase, an enzyme drug used for treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. To that end, I have developed several targeted metabolomic assays including those to quantitate 29 amino acids, amino acid derivatives and polyamines and LC-MS/MS HILIC based platform to measure metabolites from TCA cycle, pentose phosphate pathway, nucleotides and GSH/GSSG. I am further interested to elucidate the redox mechanisms involved in driving cancer cells towards sensitivity or resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. I completed my PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences with major in Analytical Chemistry at Dept. o