The new High-Throughput Metabolomics Lab at the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) within the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) has now officially opened. In a festive ceremony, Prof. Ferenc Krausz, James Hallam, Vice President of Waters, and other colleagues from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) in Budapest and the Technical University of Munich officially opened the new laboratory.
In his opening remarks, Ferenc Krausz framed the day as the start of an important shared scientific project. Prof. Zoltán Takáts, who has led the collaboration, told the audience: “Mass spectrometry can fully complement and underpin the infrared molecular fingerprinting,” describing the lab as the platform that will let the team “look into this box of human biology, which nobody before us managed to look into.” James Hallam situated the new G3 systems within Waters’ own history in high-throughput omics – from the first QTOF in 1996 to the Xevo MRT platform introduced in 2024 – calling the lab “an opportunity to bring metabolomics the scale and the standardization that unlocks its true value.”
The lab’s instruments were commissioned within four weeks of arrival. A pace Dr. Virág Sági-Kiss and others put down to a team that worked around the clock to get the instruments up and running. Now the scientists will be able to start the work proper. The lab expects to begin running samples within weeks, scaling to hundreds and eventually thousands of samples.
The new high-throughput metabolomics lab is set to become a key building block on the path to a new approach to medicine that focuses on the early detection and prevention of diseases. The ambitious goal is to establish continuous molecular monitoring at the population level for the early detection of diseases – a task that researchers at CMF, CALA, and Waters are now tackling together.
Pictures: Thorsten Naeser
