Powerful Chemistry

Two of the three most highly regarded analytical chemistry departments in the country are located in Indiana, at Purdue University and Indiana University. A grant from the 21st Century Research and Technology Fund has proved to be the catalyst necessary to spark closer cooperation between these two distinguished departments. The grant was used to help establish the Indiana Instrumentation Institute, with the purpose of allowing Purdue and I.U. to strengthen already close ties by working together—as well as with a range of industry partners such as Bioanalytical Systems, Inc., and Eli Lilly and Company—in the area of scientific instrumentation.

Headed by Purdue University Distinguished Professor R. Graham Cooks, the Institute focuses on developing instrumentation, improving instrumentation infrastructure and building partnerships with industries involved in chemical measurements. A key objective of this work is to accelerate the transfer of advanced instrumentation and technology from university laboratories into marketable products, in part by assisting graduate students and others in founding start-up companies based on research work done at Purdue and I.U. This should also help the Instrumentation Institute achieve a second goal, which is to diversify Indiana’s economy by focusing investment in biomedical research and biotechnology, information technology and other high-tech industry sectors that require high-skill, high-wage employees.

To judge how successfully the Institute is working toward these goals, consider the example of Griffin Analytical Technologies, one of three startup companies already engendered by the Instrumentation Institute. Griffin, with early support from the 21st Century Fund, has developed a miniaturized mass spectrometer (MMS) that performs chemical analysis of gases, liquids and solids for a number of application and industries, from pharmaceutical and biotechnological to automotive and environmental.

Griffin’s MMS provides a chemical “fingerprint” that indicates both what and how much is in a given sample, and it does so more rapidly and easily and less expensively than conventional mass spectrometers. Portable MMS units represent a real break-through, since until now readings of similar power had to be done in labs with much larger bench-top, or even room-size, instruments. Griffin’s portable MMS units can provide accurate readings in the field, at remote sites, such as military bases, or in airports, which may make them important players in ongoing homeland and overseas security efforts.

Additionally, it turns out that original catalyst provided by the 21st Century Fund investment in the Institute has given rise to yet another unique partnership. As a result of work done together in the Instrumentation Institute, Eli Lilly and Company, Indiana University and Purdue University saw the opportunity for even further research and development synergies. The three have formed the Indiana Proteomics Consortium to encourage breakthrough innovation in proteomics instrumentation and analytical methods. The study of proteins, proteomics holds great promise in advancing the molec-ular understanding of biology and accelerating drug discovery.