IRIC - Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer

Published on October 11, 2016

The emergence of new genomics technologies has been a key driver towards the development of personalized medicine to deliver a treatment tailored to the patient’s needs.

Mass spectrometry (MS) offers new perspectives in personalized medicine by providing a high throughput technology enabling the detailed characterization of thousands of proteins present in patient specimens. However, the performance of MS instruments is currently mitigated by the overwhelming sample complexity that limits the comprehensiveness and dynamic range of MS analyses.

The laboratory of Dr. Pierre Thibault, Principal Investigator at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) of the Université de Montréal, in partnership with Dr Jean-Jacques Dunyack of Thermo Fischer Scientific, will undertake a project targeting the development of new technologies that will improve the sensitivity and specificity of mass spectrometers for numerous applications in life sciences. In particular, this project aims to bridge the gap in proteogenomics to identify specific disease-relevant biomarkers for human cancer cells with unprecedented sensitivity.

The team of Dr. Pierre Thibault’s lab
This project will take advantage of new technological breakthroughs in ion mobility and MS to focus on two major objectives: 1) to develop a high sensitivity platform for the identification of antigens for leukemia immunotherapy programs, and 2) the targeted identification of mutations in cancer cells.

Besides generating new intellectual properties, expected social economics benefits of this project also include privileged access to state-of-the-art technology, an increase in the sensitivity and the speed of analysis in MS and potential savings for Canadian laboratories, over a large range of analytic and biomedical applications.