New research centre for precision medicine

. Technologies that analyse the chemical makeup of a tissue or body fluid sample have been used extensively in research, but their power to provide information about someone’s physical condition or disease state is only beginning to be exploited in medicine. The Phenome Centre, based at St Mary’s Hospital, brings together a collection of state-ofthe- art technologies for rapid molecular analysis to the hospital setting, aiming to put them at the heart of clinical decision-making. The ‘phenome’ describes the individual products of a person’s genetic profile and their lifestyle habits and environment. The Centre includes technologies based on mass spectrometry deployed in the operating theatre to give surgeons diagnostic information in real-time. One of the tools being developed is an ‘intelligent knife’, which analyses the smoke produced when the electrically heated surgical blade cuts into tissue during an operating procedure. Research has shown that the profile of the chemicals in the smoke can provide detailed information about the disease state of the tissue, such as whether it is cancerous, otherwise diseased or non-viable. Other projects at the Centre will develop diagnostic methods based on tissue samples and fluids such as blood and urine. The profile of chemicals present in a sample provides a read-out of the patient’s disease classification and severity. This information can inform doctors how the disease will progress in an individual patient or how the patient is responding to a particular drug and could potentially be used to predict therapeutic outcomes. The Imperial Clinical Phenome Centre is jointly funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre and industrial partners including the Waters Corporation and Bruker Spectrospin GmbH. It will be equipped with three nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers and six mass spectrometers plus a new research staff core.