Facundo Fernandez

Vasser-Wooley Professor, School of Chemisty and Biochemisty

Metabolomes, the “mirror on the wall” for complex proteomes and transcriptomes show strong promise for generating new hypothesis regarding the early stages of cancer development, and for revealing biomarker panels providing multivariate diagnostic indexes. Mass spectrometry-based metabolome profiling technologies have a demonstrated potential for early disease detection in clinical settings (e.g. newborn screening), provided the specific assays employed have the sample throughput, robustness and reproducibility necessary to handle numerous clinical samples adequately. Our group specializes in developing both targeted and untargeted mass spectrometry-based assays which, combined with multivariate data classification, provide metabolite panels that are aiding us in early cancer detection.