Chemistry Department Scores a Win

The chemistry department and Agilent Technologies have taken the first step in a process that may lead to creation of the University of Cincinnati/Agilent Technologies Metallomics Center of the Americas. A formal agreement between the two is what Joseph Caruso, professor of chemistry and former dean of McMicken College, calls a “win/win situation for us, with arguably the best analytical chemical instrumentation company in the world.”

Over the next two years, he anticipates Agilent will lend approximately $900,000 worth of state-of-the-art equipment to McMicken’s spectrochemistry lab, where it will be used to enhance research in the area of metals and nonmetals analysis. Equipment on loan will be sold by Agilent after one year and replaced with new equipment. To create a partnership in alignment with UC|21 goals, Agilent will be permitted to use the lab as a demonstration site throughout the year. Caruso’s hope is that this arrangement will continue for many years.

Metals in various chemical forms (chemical compounds) are important to all biological systems, including human life. Metallomics is a chemical analysis process that fully characterizes the different forms of a metal in a particular sample type, such as the different forms of the elements manganese or iron that might exist in a red blood cell.

The need to know more about different metal and nonmetal elemental forms in samples for chemical analyses has become increasingly urgent as concerns about homeland security and environmental safety have grown. Metallomics studies help researchers in several ways: detecting unprecedented low levels of warfare agents such as VX and Sarin, monitoring environmental pollutants such as pesticides and arsenic, enhancing the ability of plants to remediate contaminated ecosystems, and developing trace level profiles of different metal compounds in cancerous as opposed to non-cancerous cells.

As it is structured, the Agilent loan will speed the chemistry department’s and the college’s metallomics research into environmental, biological, and clinical problems and will give PhD and postdoctoral students the opportunity to be trained on state-of-the-art equipment. Chemistry faculty members and graduate students will also be able to collaborate with Agilent on publications in refereed literature and presentations at national and international scientific meetings and to enhance their portfolios with “real world” experiences.

The long term outcomes of this “loan and replace” experiment could be exceptionally beneficial to the university since they could extend into other laboratory areas, which are often deficient in analytical instrumentation. The spectrochemistry lab regularly provides analytical services to researchers in the Colleges of Medicine and Engineering and to members of the technical community, so they will also benefit. The equipment loan is crucial additionally because the spectrochemistry lab serves as the analytical core of the Superfund Basic Research Program on campus, which investigators in McMicken, Medicine, and Engineering have recently submitted for continuation.

Since the University Mass Spectrometry Center is immediately adjacent to the proposed UC/Agilent Center and both deal with different types of mass spectrometry, Caruso believes, “We will have created a synergism in mass spectrometry on this campus unequalled anywhere in the world.”

Don Potter, Agilent’s ICP-MS programs manager of the Americas and Europe, notes, “Everybody wins. Our task is to see that the partnership is so worthwhile that it continues ad infinitum.”