Princeton professor receives Agilent Thought Leader Award to research on cellular metabolism activity

Apr 18 2014

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that Joshua Rabinowitz, M.D., Ph.D., professor at Princeton University's Department of Chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, has received an Agilent Thought Leader Award to support his work on quantitative analysis of cellular metabolism.

Dr. Rabinowitz is a world-renowned scientist who has made seminal conceptual and methodological contributions to the metabolomics field. These include the development of isotopic labeling, sample preparation, data analysis, and information visualization techniques for liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry data. Together these techniques allow researchers to piece together static snapshots of metabolite levels provided by LC/MS into an understanding of dynamic metabolic activity in living systems. Dr. Rabinowitz has applied these tools to identify metabolic remodeling in infectious disease and cancer pathogenesis. The resulting understanding has led to new targets for therapeutic intervention.

"We are very happy to expand our work with Dr. Rabinowitz and his team to support their efforts developing quantitative proteomics methodologies and pan-omics studies of metabolism," said John Fjeldsted, Agilent's director of Mass Spectrometry Research and Development. "We believe this work will have a significant impact in many fundamental areas of research."

The Agilent award will support Dr. Rabinowitz's research on global cell metabolism and its regulation. He will make use of the quantitative capabilities of the Agilent 6550 MS-QTOF to generate protein stability information to supplement transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and metabolic flux data sets. From protein abundances and stabilities, he will be able to infer protein fluxes and thereby assemble an integrative understanding of how protein levels are regulated and how this ties into overall cellular metabolic activity.

"I am delighted to be working with Agilent, whose combined expertise in wet chemistry, instrumentation and software makes them an outstanding partner for my lab," said Dr. Rabinowitz. "We share Agilent's goal of enabling quantitative measurement of all key biomolecules, and of building computational tools that integrate such data to reveal new principles of living systems. Such tools hold the potential to revolutionize biomedical research."

The Agilent Thought Leader Award promotes fundamental scientific advances by contributing financial support, products and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in life sciences and chemical analysis. Information about previous award recipients is available at Agilent's Thought Leader Program website.

The Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics

The Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, housed in the Carl Icahn Laboratory at Princeton University, was established to innovate in research and teaching at the interface of modern biology and the more quantitative sciences. The Institute is the hub of the Center for Quantitative Biology, funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one branch of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Agilent Technologies Inc.