Mass spectrometry in clinical protein laboratories. Scientific Publication

Joseph John Thomson was an engineer and mathematician who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the electron in 1906, the same year that Santiago Ramón y Cajal received the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

As early as in 1899, Thompson already described an instrument that resembled a mass spectrometer. Indeed, in the following decade, the first modern mass spectrometers were developed by his disciples Aston and also Dempster, from the University of Chicago. Since then, we have witnessed extraordinary technological advances, starting with the introduction of quadrupole time-of flight instruments.

The electrospray solved the problem of large protein ionization and expanded the range of analysis, which was initially limited to small compounds. In his lecture for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry held in 2002, Fenn stated that it was “to give electrospray wings to molecular elephants”.

These and subsequent improvements, such as Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization (MALDI) and ionic trapping, turned mass spectrometry (MS) into a powerful, versatile, precise and sensitive analytical tool whose use has spread to a variety of scientific fields, including the clinical laboratory. To date, routine use of MS in the clinical laboratory has been limited to drug, steroid hormone and other metabolite testing.

However, MS has a wide range of potential applications due to its characteristics. Indeed, in the last years, its use has spread to the analysis of large molecules such as proteins, including monoclonal immunoglobulins, which are used as biomarkers for the diagnosis and monitoring of monoclonal gammopathies (MGs).

CITATION  Adv Lab Med. 2024 Jun 4;5(2):100-102.  doi: 10.1515/almed-2024-0071