Clinical Research

Metals play a crucial role for cellular and subcellular functions. These trace elements confer unique reactivities to their respective enzymes. In addition, it is well known that a number of toxic metals can inhibit enzyme functions, which leads to serious health issues.

Trace elements are increasingly used as dietary supplements in the prevention of widespread diseases and as clinically effective adjuvant therapeutics and have become a popular research area in clinical research.

Chemotherapeutic metallodrugs based on platinum or gold play a crucial role in cancer therapy and contrast agents containing Gd are routinely used for MRI examination.

All trace metals even at lowest levels can be easily quantified in all tissues and body fluids by total reflection X-ray fluorescence (TXRF) spectrometerS4 T-STAR.

The M4 Tornado micro-XRF spectrometer offers extremely sensitive spatially resolved elemental distribution analysis from Na to Am, while the M4 TORNADOPLUS further extends the element range to C. Both offer detection limits down to ppm, particularly for transition metals. The high-speed, "on-the-fly" mapping, with flexible analysis conditions, makes these spectrometers able to quickly measure high detail, high quality spectral images. One of the major benefits is that no sample preparation is required and that samples can be measured in atmospheric conditions or under Helium atmosphere to preserve organic tissue.
TheM4 TORNADOandM4 TORNADOPLUSare suited for research purposes as pre-screening device on large areas to allocate sections of interest where more complex methods like LA-ICP-MS shall be applied.

Completely standardized and fully automated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolic profiling platform is the ideal and unique technology of choice for high-performance human body fluid analysis enabling effective clinical metabolomics research and related assay development (on Research Use Only Level)