Date: 2015-08-26
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound:
Company: Agilent Technologies (USA - CA) Weill Cornell Medical College (USA - NY)
Therapeutic area: Neurodegenerative diseases - Rare diseases
Type agreement: R&D
Action mechanism:
Disease: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Details: * On August 26, 2015, Agilent Technologies announced it is collaborating with Dr. Steven Gross, a faculty member in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York, N.Y., to advance research in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig\'s disease. Agilent will provide the latest mass spectrometry technology to support his research, working toward an understanding of how the most common form of this disease develops in the body. The Agilent 6230B LC TOF and 6550A LC Q-TOF mass spectrometers will be housed in the laboratory of Dr. Gross, an internationally recognized expert in the use of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. His expertise is in pharmacology and cell biology, particularly in relation to the role of nitric oxide as a signaling molecule. Dr. Gross, along with Dr. Qiuying Chen, an assistant research professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell, and Ben Schwartz, a student in the pharmacology doctoral program at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, is studying the most common form of ALS. ALS is a deadly and progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, and is also characterized by impaired metabolic control. Sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (sALS) accounts for about 90 percent of all ALS cases and has no obvious genetic driver. Dr. Gross and his collaborators—Dr. Giovanni Manfredi, a professor of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell, and Dr. Lorenz Studer, director of Sloan Kettering Institute\'s Center for Stem Cell Biology—are investigating the molecular underpinnings of this form of ALS. The Agilent tools will empower the investigators to apply a multi-disciplinary-based approach to understanding the roots of this disease. Accurate-mass mass spectrometry will enable these researchers to test the hypothesis that fibroblasts express systemic metabolic markers that inform ALS.
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