Molecular imaging portfolio to aid drug development

The newest addition to Brucker Daltonics" molecular imaging portfolio has been launched with capabilities that make it suitable for advancing areas of drug development and delivery.

The high performance apex-ultra FTMS is equipped with Bruker's proprietary SmartBeam llaser technology.

The SmartBeam MALDI ion funnel source coupled with ultra-high mass resolution FTMS is claimed to make the apex-ultra suited for tissue imaging of small molecules, including drugs from animals dosed at therapeutic levels, for example at 5 mg/kg and lower. This new imaging solution promises to advance areas clinical and pathology research, as well as other areas of biological research such as lipidomics.

The MALDI source of the apex-ultra is the Apollo II dual ESI/MALDI source, based on the patented ion funnel technology, which provides the combination of high sensitivity with changeover between ESI and MALDI.

The addition of the SmartBeam laser technology, developed initially for the Bruker Flex line of TOF/TOFs, creates a MALDI source that provides the necessary 200 Hz repetition rate laser and less than 40 micron spot size, as well as brilliant spectra quality. SmartBeam is also compatible with the full range of matrix choices for MALDI.

The performance of the apex-ultra in the low-m/z region (150 - 2,000 m/z) does not suffer from complications of matrix background. With mass resolution greater than 900,000 (at 7 Tesla), the cluttered spectra produced in MALDI imaging of tissue samples are readily dissected, allowing for the first time MALDI-MS imaging of small molecules without the requirement to go to tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS or TOF/TOF) for chemical background suppression. This sensitivity and throughput breakthrough is due to the enhanced FTMS peak capacity, and is crucial for small molecule imaging in which crowded spectra with closely spaced peak interferences are the norm rather than the exception.

Richard Caprioli, director of the Mass Spectrometry Research Center and Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University, said: "We are delighted with the progress made through our collaboration with Bruker and we are impressed with the results thus far from our apex-ultra 9.4 FTMS. This instrument can be used for small molecule imaging and allows us to resolve complex signals present in tissue samples at low molecular weights."