Washington University School of Medicine has opened a new $15 million technology center it says is designed to help researchers advance their study of several diseases.
It has launched the Mass Spectrometry Technology Access Center (MTAC) at McDonnell Genome Institute, located at 4444 Forest Park Ave. in the Central West End. The center includes advanced technology equipment that can be used to develop and analyze biomarkers related to diseases such as diabetes, breast cancer, pediatric malnutrition and Crohn’s disease.
Between equipment and build-out, Washington University School of Medicine invested roughly $15 million into the new center.
“We are trying to be one of the best mass spectrometry centers in the nation,” said Young Ah Goo, director of MTAC.
The new center is part of several renovation projects WashU recently completed at 4444 Forest Park Ave., which is owned by the university.
Scroll through the gallery below to take a peek inside the new center.
Mass Spectrometry Technology Access Center
Jeffrey Milbrandt, executive director of the McDonnell Genome Institute and head of WashU School of Medicine’s department of genetics, said the MTAC will provide researchers with the ability to access technology that helps advance research focused on personalized medicine.
“Our ultimate goal is to improve treatments for disease,” Milbrandt said. “By being able to visualize things at a single cell level, to visualize metabolizing proteins on a slide and to see that the tumor cell is acting differently than the normal cells, and being able to see that at an individual tumor-by-tumor, even cell-by-cell basis, is going to help tremendously in helping develop treatments and monitoring the response to treatments.”
Ben Major, faculty director of MTAC, said the new center will serve as a resource for WashU researchers and can also be a key asset to help recruit graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to St. Louis. For Ben Garcia, who joined WashU in 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine to become head of the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, the new center stands out among the university’s peers.
“One of the bonuses of coming here was learning that WashU was putting in so many resources and had the motivation to start a center like this, because you don’t really see things of this scale in academia,” he said.
