Projects

Currently, drug treatments are ineffective in 30-60% of patients, and the proportion of patients with adverse drug reactions can be as high as 30%. There are many reasons for this, including gender, age and the influence of environmental factors. Accordingly, the approach to therapy is no longer a “one-size-fits-all” but to select an optimal treatment according to the individual characteristics of the patient. The prerequisite for such a personalized treatment is the detailed and precise characterization of the patient and his sickness. New molecular biological and medical analysis tools enable such a comprehensive characterization. These so-called “omics” methods include genomics (analysis of DNA) or metabolomics (analysis of small molecules involved in metabolism). As metabolites are a mirror of ongoing physiological processes, metabolomics is of particular importance in this context, as it provides a complete overview of the current physiological state of a patient in real time. The most commonly used method to perform highly sensitive analyses of the metabolome is mass spectrometry (MS). However, these MS measurements cannot be performed directly with patient samples, as these must first be freed from substances interfering with the measurement. This so-called sample preparation is a complex and error-prone laboratory procedure often performed in a highly user dependent way “by hand” with pipettes, reagents and well plates. To address this issue and provide clinics and clinical laboratories access to state-of-the-art metabolomics, we intend to establish an automated microfluidic workflow in “AUTOMETA”, which standardizes sample preparation and ensures high reliability of the ensuing metabolomic analyses.