orals 5th Asia-Pacific NMR Symposium 2013

The Use of NMR in Clinical and Epidemiological Screening (#83)

Manfred Spraul , Hartmut Schaefer 1 , Birk Schuetz 1 , Claire Cannet 1 , David Krings 1 , Fang Fang 1
  1. NMR department, Bruker-BioSpin GmbH, Rheinstetten, BW, Germany
With the advent of Metabonomcis, NMR has entered the field of mixture analysis. NMR is one of the 2 major technologies used due to its reproducibility, which allows to detect minor multiple changes in a set of NMR spectra. As an example it is important to recognize disease development at the earliest stage possible, where effects are still very minor and the whole metabolic profile is needed to recognize such changes. Due to increasing pressure to reduce health care cost, NMR has entered hospitals to support patient stratification in order to select the best and successful treatment, predict organ rejection after transplantation, detect early development of sepsis. stratification means phenotyping the patient. Such phenotyping can be obtained from large epidemiological studies. If results should be transfered to hospital usage, sample preparation and measurement have to be standardized. An important event in this endeavour was the opening of the UK National Phenome Center in June 2013, which is considered to be the cristallization point of a whole series of phenome centers all over the world operating under the same SOP`s to guarantee exchangeability of data. Besides statistical analysis, quantification of a substantial set of compounds typically appearing in bodyfluids and tissues became important especially for medical doctors, who are not trained in NMR and cannot interprete spectra, they just need results to make decisions. This situation neccessitates high accuracy of analysis under full automation. It is explained how, this is achieved and some examples are given to illustrate the clinical use of NMR screening.