Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on powerful new technology for life science research, onlyx000D
to discover that you cannot fully use the data that it produces. This is a situation in a large number of academicx000D
and industry laboratories that have purchased mass spectrometers for R&D spanning all areas of biological andx000D
environmental sciences. New technologies in mass spectrometry have spurred tremendous growth in newx000D
methods for compound characterization, especially in the biopharmaceuticals industry. Biopharmaceuticals arex000D
protein drugs. They represent a very effective class of pharmaceutical agents and the area is experiencing ax000D
high rate of growth worldwide. Mass spectrometry is the perfect choice of technology to support thex000D
development of new protein drugs, and to ensure that these complicated drugs are safe to use. The companiesx000D
that make mass spectrometers are not able to keep up with the many new directions that biopharmaceuticalx000D
companies are taking mass spectrometry, and the situation is expected to deteriorate further. We developed ax000D
transformative solution to this problem, in the form of an application-building software platform called thex000D
Mass Spec Studio. This platform strongly reduces the development time for creating new applications. It isx000D
currently houses research-grade plug-ins that are very useful for a form of protein characterization calledx000D
higher-order structure (HOS) analysis. In this project we will complete version 2 of the Mass Spec Studio. Itx000D
will contain industry-leading plug-ins for HOS analysis and streamline the application development processx000D
even further. The goal of the project is to create a package of technologies that will help mass spectrometryx000D
keep pace with the needs of the biopharmaceutical industry, and ensure that protein drugs are effective andx000D
safe.