Firm teamed up with two Japanese researchers from Tokyo Medical University.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is establishing a new Biomarker Research Center in Tokyo, Japan, with Toshihide Nishimura, a professor at the Tokyo Medical University Hospital, and Gyorgy Marko-Varga, professor at the Tokyo Medical University Hospital and Lund University, Sweden. It will focus on biomarker discovery and quantification, disease mechanisms, therapeutic drug monitoring, and disease pathophysiology.

Thermo Fisher, through its Biomarker Research Initiatives in Mass Spectrometry (BRIMS), will offer its expertise in mass spectrometry-based assays, workflow development, and technology integration. It will also provide a network of collaborators engaged in similar research. The aim is for such partnerships to result in the Tokyo Biomarker Center, which will have dedicated laboratories based at Tokyo Medical.

Correlation of protein expression and quantitative regulation for diseases of key concern in Japan, such as lung cancer, COPD, and cardiovascular disease, will be performed to discover biomarker candidates related to drug response. The research center will also house an archive with tissue and blood samples along with access to complementary clinical and demographic data. The archive will include samples from clinical studies performed in Scandinavia and other European countries.

Professor Toshihide Nishimura focuses on mass spectrometric development for clinical applications. He has conducted clinical research on biomarkers for lung disease and prostate cancer. He is a board member of the Japan Human Proteome Organization and the Japanese Society for Clinical Proteomics.

Professor Gyorgy Marko-Varga is senior drug discovery/development scientist at AstraZeneca. He is currently focused on developing diagnostic assays and platforms and interfacing high-resolution separation with mass spectrometry to understand disease mechanisms of and drug effects for lung cancer and COPD.

Professor Marko-Varga worked with Professor Nishimura on a protein biomarker discovery research project involving 52 lung cancer centers in Japan. He is currently responsible for a lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and COPD study that involves 400,000 patients in Sweden.

The BRIMS Center opened in 2004 to support the development of methodologies and applications for protein biomarker identification and verification. Equipped with a full complement of Thermo Scientific mass spectrometers and staffed by a team of scientists with expertise in mass spectrometry, protein techniques, and informatics, the BRIMS Center also develops leading software tools for proteomic research.

Previous articleHuman Genome Redux: Just a Numbers Game?
Next articleCMC Biologics to Manufacture ProtAffin’s Preclinical-Stage IL-8 Decoy