At Pittcon 2023, we spoke to Ron Heeren from MaastrichtU about the use of ion mass spectrometry in molecular imaging.
Sponsored Content by PittconMay 1 2023Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc. insights from industryProfessor Ron HeerenLimburg chair and director of the Maastricht Multimodal Molecular Imaging InstituteMaastricht University In this interview conducted at Pittcon 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we spoke to Ron Heeren, a speaker at the 2023 James L. Waters Symposium.
What is secondary ion mass spectrometry? The field I am engaging in is molecular imaging using mass spectrometry. There are essentially two ways of generating images with a mass spectrometer. The first is firing lasers at a surface to evaporate and ionize molecules, then analyzing them in the mass spectrometer. The second uses an ion beam, where a primary ion generates secondary ions that are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer.
How can secondary ion mass spectrometry be employed in molecular imaging? The beauty of secondary ion mass spectrometry is its incredible spatial resolution. These ion beams can be focused down to an extremely small spot, down to 50 nanometers. With molecular imaging, we can generate very small pixels, which provides an insight into what is going on in a single cell in the context of a complete tissue.
We can look at pharmaceutical and animal models, where we observe where the drug ends up, how it is metabolized, and if it has an effect. These are all problems in a spatial context. These technologies can be applied with a gold star in biomedicine and pharmaceutical research. The 34th James L. Waters Symposium highlights the development, commercial construction, and recent advances in instrumentation and its applications. What are some of the recent advancements in secondary ion mass spectrometry? The James L. Waters Symposium highlights instrumentation advances, such as targeted pathology, where people use labeled antibodies to observe targeted proteome processes in detail.
These early ideas are now accelerating because of all the new available technologies. This symposium beautifully highlighted that as it brought together all these different elements: instrumentation, engineering, application in the clinic, targeted pathology, and the history on which it all was based.
How do you hope your work will help overcome some of the challenges you mentioned? I am afraid my work will only worsen those two challenges because we are generating more data in a shorter time. However, while we are doing that, we also face these challenges. We have many bioinformaticians that we collaborate with to tackle those problems using machine learning and neural networks.
This allows us to understand how the metabolic phenotype of an immune cell changes in the presence of a tumor and as a response to the distance to the tumor. So much more complexity is yet to be discovered and understood, which will significantly contribute to that.
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