Ambient Ionization: A Dream for the Surgical Oncologist?

Abstract

One challenge for the cancer surgeon is to consistently distinguish tumor from healthy tissue and definitively remove the tumor with clean margins. The pathologist plays a key role in confirming the identity of the tissue removed, but it takes time to remove the sample, send it to the pathologist, and receive an expert analysis. In addition, this process is limited to the review of a small number of samples, given the burden on the pathologist. Is there a way for a surgeon to receive a near-real-time, intraoperative, automatic histological analysis? Dr. Graham Cooks, professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue University, thinks so. Desorption electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) ionizes samples without preparation and in the open environment. “The underlying principle is to reduce the amount of work that the analytical scientist does; in particular, reduce the grunt work regarding manipulation,” says Cooks in an interview with Clinical Chemistry . His passion for the subject came out of his PhD work, in which he conducted large-scale chromatography on the extensive plant material he was investigating. It took a year and …