Doctor Stephan Hann

For biotech companies, the products include complex recombinant proteins used in biomedical applications. For Hann and his fellow researchers, the products are validated methods.

"We are publishing new separation methods, new detection concepts, and new data evaluation concepts," he says.

A pure analytical chemist, Hann sees his work as part of a process of continuous improvement and optimization taking place throughout the global scientific community.

"One of the challenges is that we want to analyze more samples in less time, so we always aim to develop methods that are less time consuming," he says.

Although metabolomics is hardly a new science, it is still in its infancy compared to disciplines such as genomics and proteomics, which have enjoyed heightened focus in recent years.

"We have many, many different compounds, and metabolomics tools are not so advanced that we can put everything into the software and the software brings us the final result," he says. "It's a lot of manual work."

"Metabolomics is emerging as a very important area of research—comparable to where proteomics was several years ago," he says. "I am confident that we will end up with the kind of well-developed data evaluation tools they have now in proteomics."

More specifically, Agilent is contributing to Hann's work in metabolic flux analysis, an experimental technique designed to examine the production and consumption rates of metabolites in a biological system.

"We are developing and implementing GC/MS- and LC/MS-based methods to analyze important metabolites of the central carbon metabolism," Hann says. "We are performing targeted quantitative measurements via LC/MS/MS and GC/MS/MS, and we are using the novel Agilent 7200 GC/Q-TOF MS to measure the distribution of metabolites of interest. This will enable us to determine in vivo reaction rates.

"We are one of the first groups using the GC/Q-TOF in metabolomics, and we are very happy with the results. We can give our methods to another lab and they will get the same results we do," he adds.

"Since this is still an emerging field, we don't have reference materials. Nobody knows: What is the real content of these cells? To see that we are able to produce comparable data between different labs—this was a real milestone for us. It is especially gratifying to see that the methods we have developed and the data we are producing is beneficial to the biotechnology industry."