New centre heralds age of precision medicine  

A new phenotyping research centre in London aims to help doctors diagnose illness more efficiently and choose the best treatments for patients based on their individual metabolic and physiological characteristics.

The Imperial Clinical Phenome Centre, based at St Mary's Hospital, includes technologies based on mass spectrometry which are deployed in the operating theatre to give surgeons useful diagnostic information in real-time. One of the tools, being developed by Dr Zoltan Takats, is the "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 provides 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. Profiles obtained can provide information of disease classification and severity and inform doctors of its progression in individuals and how patients respond to a particular drug..

The 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.

This is the second phenotyping research centre to be established at Imperial this year, and both are the first of their type in the world. The new Centre will be closely linked with the MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, a collaboration between Imperial and King's College London, which is more focussed on population screening and is due to open in early 2013 at Imperial's Hammersmith campus. A major Metabolic Phenotyping Research Centre which has been running for many years at Imperial's South Kensington campus provides research and development, data processing and international training support for the two new Phenome Centres.

Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, said: "These analytical technologies are now very mature and are immensely powerful for telling us about someone's physical condition and disease state. Bringing them fully into the clinical setting will help doctors make a more informed diagnosis, choose the best treatment based on the individual characteristics of the patient, and monitor their progress more precisely. It is the dawn of a new age of 'precision medicine'."