After graduating as a pharmacist in the summer of 2014, I was fortunate to start a PhD project to be carried out under the umbrella of the Dutch Biomarker Development Center (BDC), which is a research consortium that tries to bring promising new blood tests from a research environment to a clinical environment. Or in other words: from the hands of the researchers to the hands of the doctors.
In a way, the aims of the BDC were a bit unusual from a scientific point of view, since the blood tests to be targeted by the BDC did not need to be entirely novel but may already have been applied for several years, albeit on a small scale and in a simple version. Applying such tests on a larger scale requires researchers to resolve additional challenges that typically are of a completely different nature than they are used to. It thus makes sense that these researchers frequently refrain from accepting such challenges, and, instead, focus on the development of yet another novel blood test. In fact, corresponding projects can be labeled as their next ‘exploration of the unknown’, which is a label that increases their chances of receiving research funding. (To be absolutely clear, it is essential that researchers keep developing novel blood tests, so this is a good thing)
The translation of research-grade blood tests to clinical-grade blood tests brings along scientific challenges, as was touched upon in the text above. Unfortunately, the label of such research endeavors is typically not considered to be very ‘sexy’, which reduces the chances of getting funding (NB: no money = no project). The principal investigators of the BDC, however, did their utmost to establish an innovative, large-scale research initiative on this subject, which was very well accepted by funding agencies and, more importantly, got funded.
The central idea of this initiative was not to focus on individual blood tests that are considered to be promising, but rather to focus on tackling the common technological challenges that scare away researchers from bringing their innovative tests any further than the initial ‘proof-of-concept’ stage. Such challenges obviously come in plenty, hence the BDC creators divided them over different projects (for three PhD students and three postdoctoral researchers, who were evenly distributed over three cities in the Netherlands) in an attempt to address as many of these challenges as possible.
Fortunately, I was one of the lucky few to become a BDC researcher, and, in a nutshell, it was my job to focus on the simplification, standardization, acceleration, and automation of procedures that are typically carried out to prepare a blood sample for measurement. Ideally, you place a drop of blood directly on an analytical device which immediately gives you a result; however, blood needs to be processed first for most analytical techniques. This requirement also applies to the analytical technique that is known as ‘mass spectrometry’, or ‘MS’, which is (arguably) an emerging technique in medical laboratories and which was the technique of interest for my PhD project.
Finally, even though my research goals were mostly technology-oriented, we did consult scientific literature and searched for promising, previously developed, research-grade blood tests which we targeted in my project. We did this so we could immediately demonstrate the usefulness of the results we achieved on the basis of real-life examples. Broadly speaking, two targets of interest took center stage in my projects, and you can read more about them on the pages dedicated to my IGF1 project and my sRAGE project.
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