Chris ZangStep out of the elevator on the seventh floor of Pharmacy Hall and you enter one of the more unique parts of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy (UMSOP).
Immediately you are met by a row of refrigerators and freezers, compressed gas tanks, the white noise hum from more than 20 state-of-the-art instruments that reside there, the crisp air conditioning that keeps them happy with temperatures in the 60s. There’s even a separate open-concept wet chemistry laboratory.
But more than a chilly nirvana, UMSOP’s Mass Spectrometry Center (MSC) is a solutions center. Dozens of clients a year from near and far rely on executive director Maureen Kane, PhD, and her MSC team to verify the accuracy of their hypothesis, whether it’s testing a small piece of the puzzle or the big-picture theory.
“We do everything from small-scale single experiments to very large multiyear projects,” says Kane, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences who led the effort to create MSC in 2010. Fifteen years later, it is flourishing, collaborating with partners as varied as the size of the instruments that fill the center’s five rooms.
At its most basic, mass spectrometry involves measuring the masses of ions in a sample to answer diverse biological and chemical questions. A lot of flexibility is necessary because, as Kane says with a smile, “If there’s not a measurement tool available, we have to figure it out. Sometimes the way to answer the question doesn’t exist yet, and we have to come up with that first.”
Kane’s MSC staff of five scientists tackle a wide range of subjects for clients, both within and outside the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). “We are an organized research center,” says Kane, “so we collaborate with people to make our expertise accessible across campus and beyond.”
For example, UMSOP professors Angela Wilks, PhD, Fengtian Xue, PhD, and Alexander MacKerell, PhD, are targeting the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a leading cause of hospital-acquired infections and chronic infection in cystic fibrosis. To assist, the MSC team has conducted analyses to better understand factors related to heme uptake and metabolism in infection.
Clients Near and Far
Sometimes the clients are outside the University. MSC worked with a geneticist at the University of Oxford in England 3,500 miles away on the effect of DHRS3 mutations on protein function important to birth defects. The project was an extension of a prior study between Kane and scientists in Kansas City, Mo., and Ontario, Canada.
Then other times the research partners are from other schools at UMB (four of the seven so far) and within the University System of Maryland. Kane’s team currently is working with Michael Cummings, PhD, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Marta Lipinski, PhD, associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, just across the street at UMB, on how aging impacts the brain. Eventually their work could aid treatments for age-related diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s.
MSC created methodology to measure changes in thousands of biomolecules. “With a molecular understanding of how the injury occurs and progresses, new mitigating therapeutic interventions can be developed,” says Kane.
Lipinski, who focused on mouse models of traumatic brain injury, says MSC’s contributions have been essential.
“They not only simplified but enabled our research. In collaboration with Dr. Kane and the Mass Spec Center, we are able to address research questions that we would never be able to tackle alone,” says Lipinski. “As an example, we were able to determine changes in lipid and protein composition during brain aging. These data are important as these changes affect brain function and help identify processes that contribute to healthy brain aging as opposed to disease.”
Cummings, who is developing software tools to assess the brain’s changes in lipids and proteins, praises MSC colleagues for how easy they are to collaborate with. “They are very responsive to questions, ready to provide explanations and provide expertise to help in analysis interpretation. The data they have provided has allowed multi-omics analyses that provide richer and more comprehensive inferences.”
Kane says this is in keeping with the center’s service mission. “There are a lot of mass spectrometry centers across the country where you drop off your samples and somebody gives you an answer. Here we interact as part of the team and as a true collaborative entity.”
Other breakthroughs MSC has had a hand in during the past 15 years include better understanding the pathophysiology of numerous diseases and injuries, genes responsible for birth defects, studies that influenced Food and Drug Administration guidance, and development of therapeutics that will be the next generation of drugs.
Supporting $110 Million in Grants
Between 2020 and 2024, MSC supported 70 research grants from 41 principal investigators totaling $110 million.
Some projects start with a small grant, which leads to a bigger one. The aging study with Cummings and Lipinski, for instance, began with a state funding initiative called AI + Medicine for High Impact. A four-year, $2.7 million National Institutes of Health grant followed.
The center’s growth fills Kane with pride. “Necessity sometimes is the fuel for creativity,” she says. “We’ve come a long way. I’m definitely proud of the breadth of people we’ve been able to support. Everything from the people we’ve trained to the science we’ve published, colleagues we’ve helped. Rarely do we smell the roses. It’s always on to solving the next problem.” Such is life at the Mass Spectrometry solutions center.
