On this new episode of OMG OMx, Kate Stumpo speaks to Sapient’s Tanya Nguyen in regards to the position of omics and mass spectrometry in neurosciences. Learn chosen highlights under, or watch the total podcast:
Tanya Nguyen | OMG OMx Podcast | Ep. 10
Can you’re taking us via your omics background and the way you got here to embrace this discipline?
I’m a clinician scientist by coaching, specializing in neuropsychology and brain-behavior relationships. For a number of years, I used to be a professor at UC San Diego, attending the College Medical Middle. I used to be additionally a analysis college member and operated a scientific analysis lab centered on understanding biomarkers of neuroinflammation within the context of neuropsychiatric illnesses.
My background differs barely from lots of my colleagues within the omics space, offering me with a novel perspective on how we are able to apply omics to raised deal with scientific human illnesses, and a scientific perspective on how this can ultimately affect affected person lives and outcomes.
How has your time within the scientific area offered you with new insights into doing analysis?
One of many issues I typically felt was lacking in my early preclinical analysis was the understanding of what occurs subsequent. How does this work translate into scientific purposes? How can I affect the lives of scientific sufferers? Maybe this was as a result of I used to be younger and nonetheless an undergraduate with nice aspirations. This led me to shift my focus for my Ph.D. and pursue a scientific diploma.
My Ph.D. was in neuropsychology. This was a novel analysis and mixed scientific diploma, the place I not solely discovered an essential methodology for conducting scientific biomedical analysis but in addition grew to become clinically licensed to evaluate and deal with sufferers with issues I used to be researching.
Throughout my scientific work, I used to be centered on the evaluation and therapy of older adults with several types of psychological sicknesses. These primarily included main psychiatric illnesses in addition to superior dementia syndromes.
As a part of my scientific Ph.D. analysis, I additionally labored on how one can design and conduct randomized scientific trials for dietary interventions. This constructed upon my undergraduate analysis on how one can enhance cognitive operate in sufferers with numerous teratological illnesses—together with prenatal alcohol publicity, autism spectrum issues, and others.
Picture Credit score: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
Is there an OMG second that helped you begin the highway down science?
My “OMG” second occurred throughout my postdoctoral analysis. On the time, I got interested within the gut-brain axis. The microbiome was budding within the scientific analysis neighborhood throughout this time. Whereas extensively studied within the context of GI sickness, it was simply making its approach into the sphere of neurodegenerative and neuropsychological illnesses.
As a postdoc and an early profession college member, plenty of my analysis was centered on finding out microbial-based biomarkers and the way they contribute to the pro-inflammatory milieu noticed in neuropsychiatric illnesses. Whereas finding out these microbes, I believed it essential to grasp the metabolomics, metabolites, and lipids which are created by these bugs.
I aimed to discover how these compounds affect downstream processes and work together with different danger elements and comorbid circumstances which may be current within the sufferers. That is once I started collaborating with our now co-founders at Sapient: Mo Jain, Jeramie Watrous, and Tao Lengthy.
How is mass spectrometry essential within the broad omics discipline that you simply focus on?
Mass spectrometry performs an essential position in many various areas. Its performance is a software that may be utilized to many various purposes. I feel that it’s agnostic to totally different illnesses, and as talked about earlier, spans totally different phases of drug improvement.
From the early phases of discovery and understanding the mechanism of motion to focus on identification and validation, mass spectrometry proves invaluable. Its utility extends to extra patient-oriented purposes like affected person stratification and scientific trial enrichment.
That is what excites me as I’ve at all times been extra of a strategies expertise researcher. Whereas the illness is essential, my focus has at all times been on exploring how instruments will be utilized to raised perceive totally different illnesses.
As a scientist, it has been enjoyable to broaden my horizons and understanding of how totally different illnesses work, how totally different interventions for various populations might range, and with the ability to use the identical software to succeed in totally different conclusions.
In regards to the speaker
Dr. Nguyen is a clinician-scientist with over 13 years of analysis expertise, having been principal investigator on various Nationwide Institutes of Well being- and Basis-supported multi-site scientific trials. Dr. Nguyen’s work has leveraged multi-omics discovery inside the context of human biosampling to uncover new biomarkers for illness analysis and therapy. At Sapient, Dr. Nguyen acts as a liaison between scientific, enterprise, and operational groups overseeing key buyer relationships and partnerships.
omg OMx host: Kate Stumpo, Senior Market Supervisor at Bruker
About Bruker Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry
Uncover new methods to use mass spectrometry to at the moment’s most urgent analytical challenges. Improvements comparable to Trapped Ion Mobility (TIMS), smartbeam and scanning lasers for MALDI-MS Imaging that ship true pixel constancy, and eXtreme Decision FTMS (XR) expertise succesful to disclose Isotopic High-quality Construction (IFS) signatures are pushing scientific exploration to new heights. Bruker‘s mass spectrometry options allow scientists to make breakthrough discoveries and acquire deeper insights.
