Bruker partners with ANPC to support major new frontline response to combat the COVID-19 threat

Bruker is proud to partner with Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC) at Murdoch University to support the work of their researchers into the COVID-19 pandemic threat.

The ANPC team, led by world-renowned phenomics pioneer and academician Professor Jeremy Nicholson, and working with the South Metropolitan Health Service COVID-19 Response Team and the broader Western Australian (WA) healthcare community, has launched a major research and diagnostics project to better understand and predict variation in COVID-19 severity and determine the complex genetic, environmental and lifestyle interactions that influence its pathogenicity in individuals. Later they will engage with clinical trials of novel antiviral agents and when available vaccines in order to predict responder/non-responder outcomes.

Accelerating time to diagnosis

The goal is to deliver diagnostic and prognostic solutions in an accelerated time-frame. Most importantly, the risk of severity of infected patients needs to be assessed rapidly to help guide and optimize the clinical patient pathway. Researchers at the ANPC will use a range of state-of-the-art Avance IVDr nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and timsTOF Pro, Impact II and Solarix MR mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation from Bruker, as well as data modeling approaches, to perform broad and deep metabolic analysis of the molecular, physical and biochemical characteristics of blood plasma and urine samples to create informative translational models. These models will predict variation in the severity of the disease and help understand differential responses to therapeutic interventions.

Professor Nicholson said: “At the ANPC, we are dedicating 100% of our resources to the COVID-19 fight for at least a year. This is the greatest emergent healthcare challenge on the planet and there is no better equipped metabolic lab in Australia, or possibly anywhere in the world, to undertake this type of investigative work in an excellent clinical and hospital framework.

“Linked to our genomics team, led by Professor Simon Mallal and Associate Professor Mark Watson, we’re setting out to identify specific biomarkers of the disease to figure out who has it, how we can detect it and stratify patients by severity risk, and assess the real time patient responses to treatments.”:

Scientific partnership to drive clinical research

Frank H. Laukien, Ph.D, President and CEO of Bruker Corporation, commented: “We are strongly committed to supporting Professor Nicholson and his team scientifically and technically. The comprehensive COVID-19 clinical research plan at Murdoch University into metabolic biomarker patterns of diseases, prognosis, and treatment response is exceptional.

“In particular, I hope that the team can find evidence-based clinical protocols very soon to reduce mortality in ‘phase 2’ of COVID-19 with its life-threatening lower respiratory tract infections. Medical science needs to determine urgently whether broad spectrum antibiotics and/or immunosuppressants improve survival statistics in ‘phase 2’, when viral pneumonia, potential bacterial pneumonia or ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), as well as lung inflammation due to our own immune systems’ cytokine storms, appear to create a very dangerous set of co-morbidities.”