Our research focuses on taking integrated proteomics, metabolomics, and analytical approaches to identify molecular mechanisms of disease, its biomarkers and develop technologies for their detection and accurate quantification. Centering on our expertise and interests in redox biology/energy metabolism, our effort is distributed among three areas including my own research (30% effort), translational research (30% effort) and collaborative projects (40% effort).

A major component of these activities is the identification of cancer biomarkers and their use in elucidating disease and progression mechanisms. In technology development, our focus is primarily on platform development for 1/precise quantification of change in metabolite or protein concentrations, and2/ molecular tissue imaging. These are key elements of Systems Biology and hold significant promise to identify important relationships between metabolites, proteins, and genes.

In translational research, we have recently introduced a plasma separation device which is a self-contained, blood-plasma sampling device used to volumetrically collect a plasma aliquot independent of whole blood application volume. This technology requires no power and circumvents requirements for venipuncture-phlebotomy training, needles, special vials and equipment, refrigeration, and centrifugation normally associated with traditional plasma methods. The goal of this project is to validate the sampling technology for a panel of known biomarkers routinely used for screening and monitoring of specific cancers, and to test how changes of differentials in those markers correlate with existing methods and with disease diagnosis, recurrence, progression, and treatment efficacy.

Louisiana Cancer Research Center