As you recall we funded two OMS research projects in July of 2014. Late last year we got an update from how these projects are both progressing and wanted to share it with our community of supporters, friends, and family because it was you who made this possible!
As a reminder, Dr. Lang's study aims to identify antigens using Mass Spectrometry and Dr. Owens' study aims to better understand which proteins in the brain might be targets of antibodies. Both study abstracts can be found here.
As a reminder, Dr. Lang's study aims to identify antigens using Mass Spectrometry and Dr. Owens' study aims to better understand which proteins in the brain might be targets of antibodies. Both study abstracts can be found here.
Dr. Lang was able to combine our funding with another research initiative in the UK, which will extend the project to two years of work! Georgina Berridge joined the laboratory team earlier this month to take the lead on the Mass Spectroscopy work. In Dr. Lang's own words:
"She has been in Oxford several years, and is very experienced in running samples for Mass Spectroscopy. This is the main cornerstone of the project and certainly something that is not part of my own speciality, so a perfect complement to the skills we already have available....this is such excellent news. We have a very exciting two years in front of us. By joining the grants together as well as getting someone like Georgina for two years we also get the input and application of two other fantastic scientists (Dr Sarosh Irani and Dr Teresa Moloney)."
Georgina Berridge
Team left to right: Berridge, Lang, Moloney, Irani
Dr. Owens - University of Colorado School of Medicine
Dr. Owens' team is in the middle of performing a successful repertoire on one of the patient samples. They were troubleshooting an issue with OMS B cells showing poor amplification with single-cell PCR, whereas the control B cells were working well. Ultimately this means they cannot understand the B cell structure and behavior. They have other strategies that they can employ if this particular B cell sorting strategy doesn't yield positive results.
We're hoping to receive another update shortly from both teams.
There are definitely a lot of details in these updates which I do not understand myself, but the takeaway here is that the science we funded is moving forward and researchers are actively studying, troubleshooting, iterating, and analyzing OMS.
Thank you again for all your continued support...we hope to share our goals for 2015 with you all very soon!
Naveen & Crystal