The mass spectrometer (MS) originated in Europe, near the beginning of the 20th century. The main application at the time was for analyzing the isotopes of elements. Later, related technologies, such as for sample pretreatment, ionization, separation, and trace amount detection methods were developed remarkably. Today, MS systems can be used to analyze a wide variety of organic compounds, such as lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, peptides and proteins.
In particular, proteomics, the comprehensive analysis of all proteins in a specimen, is large-scale research that developed along with MS from around the year 2000 and has had a major role in researching disease biomarkers.
Our team participated in the "Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology (FIRST),” an industry-academia-government collaboration that started in Japan in 2010. That collaboration successfully detected trace amounts of Aβ in plasma using a MALDI-TOFMS system (Kaneko et al. 2014a) and showed that those amounts correlate to amyloid accumulations in the brain (Kaneko et al. 2014b). Furthermore, we engaged in international joint research and published the results in Nature, in an article entitled “High performance plasma amyloid-β biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease” (Nakamura et al. 2018).
In my presentation, I intend to explain mainly the history of how such MS techniques developed into biology and medical fields, particularly for establishing a variety of biomarkers for brain disorders.