Technology Partnership to Tackle Society’s Big Challenges

The University of Western Australia has teamed up with Agilent Technologies, committing to a five-year collaboration that will enable the development of ground-breaking applications in Life Sciences.

The partnership with Agilent Technologies will contribute to UWA’s local, national and international research and teaching alliances through the Centre of Metabolomics, The ARC Centre if Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the UWA Comparative Analysis of Biomolecular Networks Research and Training Centre.

The UWA Centres have agreed to put Agilent platform technologies and applications to the test in an effort to advance international training opportunities while furthering research into some of society's big challenges in health, food production and the environment.

Through its Agilent Global Academia Program, Agilent has already donated a high-resolution mass spectrometer, used to provide accurate metabolomic analysis of molecules in complex samples, as well as cash grants as part of the five-year collaboration with UWA.

Researchers are excited at the opportunity of a big increase in capability in areas of research including drug discovery and metabolism, innovative pathway mapping in diseases such as cancer and diabetes, environmental pollution characterisation, food analysis and disease biomarker discovery.

Leading liver cancer researcher Professor George Yeoh, explained the new LC-QTOF mass spectrometer will help to identify pathway targets that can be used against cancer cells, as well as for monitoring outcomes of strategies to control cancer cells.

“We expect that many pathways that have been implicated in tumour development will be more accurately and comprehensively assessed for the first time," he said.

Rod Minett, General Manager, Life Sciences, South Asia Pacific and Korea, at Agilent, said the company had formed a strong partnership with the national Metabolomics Australia network and with researchers at UWA.