MSACL 2018 US Abstract

Topic: Metabolomics

Can We Advance Health Monitoring the Way Google Has Advanced Text Mining for the General Population?

Pieter Dorrestein (Presenter)
UCSD

Bio: Dorrestein is Professor at the University of California - San Diego. He is the Director of the Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center and a Co-Director, Institute for Metabolomics Medicine in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Departments of Pharmacology and Pediatrics. Since his arrival to UCSD in 2006, Prof. Dorrestein has been pioneering the development of mass spectrometry methods to study the chemical ecological crosstalk between populations of microorganisms, including host interactions for agricultural, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. He participated in panels for the white house science and technology office of president on the launch of a national microbiome initiative and has been on panels for the National Academy of Sciences on the Chemistry of the Microbiome. He has co-authored over 220 publications and his work has been featured by the wall street journal, CNN, NYTimes, Fox, BBC and hundreds of other news outlets. He has been recognized with several awards, among them are awards from the Beckman foundation, V-foundation in cancer research, EUREKA award for unconventional and enabling research, Hearst Foundation, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association research award and the Abel award in pharmacology. For a more detailed biography see http://www.nature.com/news/the-man-who-can-map-the-chemicals-all-over-your-body-1.20035

Authorship: Pieter C Dorrestein
UCSD

Short Abstract While significant advances have been made in proof-of-principle approaches in mass spectrometry, they are not yet used by the general population. Yet, and although still far away, the future potential exists that one day every person with a smart toilet, smart mirror and if size of instrumentation can be solved, a smart phone, will perform molecular analysis of any object/sample they want. While it is clear that such capabilities do not yet exist for mass spectrometry, we will highlight the potential with experiments from our own laboratories with our longterm longitudional data collections, crowdsourced sample collections and our patient at home freezer collection program so that episodes of disease can be characterized.

Long Abstract

While significant advances have been made in proof-of-principle approaches in mass spectrometry, they are not yet used by the general population. Yet, and although still far away, the future potential exists that one day every person with a smart toilet, smart mirror and if size of instrumentation can be solved, a smart phone, will perform molecular analysis of any object/sample they want. This information will then be collected and we gain global insight into the molecular diversity that exists in the world and their distributions. When such a routine analysis becomes a reality, we will change what we eat, how we preserve food, how we prepare clothing and construction materials, how we exercise, and how we approach health. But what would a potential roadmap look like to achieve such amazing goal? How do we make the data that is collected more informative? How do we reuse such information to enhance our molecular understanding? How did Google, Amazon or Facebook achieve this for text searches? While it is clear that such capabilities do not yet exist for mass spectrometry, we will highlight the potential with experiments from our own laboratories with our longterm longitudional data collections, crowdsourced sample collections and our patient at home freezer collection program so that episodes of disease can be characterized. This will be highlighted with specific examples of unique microbial and plant peptides that are discovered in non-clinical settings such as fundamental biological studies but show up in human clinical samples, highlighting the importance of cross comparison of even unrelated samples. Finally the longitudional results reveal that wile we can look at the population level, its more effective to look at the individual level. Such investigations will be the key requirement to make the information from mass spectrometry techniques usable for the larger community on a daily basis. This will eventually become as common as a Google search done today but instead of a text search, it will be a simple mass spectrometric scan of a sample to assess your own health.

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