Mari DeMarco, PhD, DABCC, FCACB, is a Clinical Chemist at Providence Health Care, the Research Director of Providence Research, and a Clinical Associate Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada. Dr. DeMarco completed her PhD in the Biomolecular Structure and Design program at the University of Washington, and a clinical chemistry fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine.

With a strong interest in bridging basic biomedical science, analytical chemistry and laboratory medicine, Dr. DeMarco’s research group focuses on building new biofluid tests for direct translation into patient care. A particular area of interest is advancing protein-based clinical diagnostics for neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. The goal of this program of research is to ensure that these new tools make the challenging jump from research into healthcare.

Originally Presented at MSACL 2022.

Want to run a new test in your clinical lab that takes multiple days to prep, has a complicated (and costly) calibration scheme, and a detection approach so selective it could miss the analyte of interest? If that doesn’t sound appealing, you would be in the majority! While the analytical advantages of mass spectrometry resulted in it decisively displacing ligand binding methods as the gold standard approach for protein quantitation, making progress on the routine testing front has taken additional effort. Here we look at how re-evaluating the status quo in clinical proteomics has helped us take leaps forward and implement protein mass spectrometry to improve patient care.

Geoffrey Baird, M.D., Ph.D., is a board certified pathologist at UW Medicine, and professor and acting chair of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. He directs the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at Harborview Medical Center.

Dr. Baird’s goal is to provide the highest quality lab services to patients in the UW community and Pacific Northwest region.

Dr. Baird earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from UC San Diego. He is board-certified in Anatomic Pathology, Clinical Pathology and Clinical Chemistry. His clinical and research interests include lab test utilization management, proteomics, tissue analysis, general laboratory medicine, pathology and pathophysiology of organ systems and anatomic pathology.

As medical science continues to make gains in the elucidation of disease pathophysiology and the discovery of cures , some have questioned the value of dedicating dwindling financial resources to maintaining wellness rather than to fighting disease per se. While both approaches are meritorious and complementary, neither approach is alone sufficient to ensure the health of a population. One major problem with the focus on wellness is the Bayesian dilemma that the positive predictive value of clinical laboratory testing in apparently healthy people is often low, as the specificities of few clinical tests are high enough to ensure that most positive results are true. The impact of this dilemma on laboratory-based wellness approaches will be discussed.

Jennifer Van Eyk, PhD, is an international leader in the area of clinical proteomics and her lab has focused on developing technical pipelines for de novo discovery and larger scale quantitative mass spectrometry methods. This includes multiple reaction monitoring (MRM, also known as SRM) and most recently data independent acquisition. Dr. Van Eyk's laboratory is well known for the extreme technical quality of the data generated, rigorous quality control with tight %CV while applying these to key clinical questions. The aim is to maximize throughput and reproducibility in order to move targeted and robust discovery methods into large population healthy continuous assessment and clinical grade assays focusing on brain and cardiovascular diseases.