UWA, Agilent announce five-year collaboration

CRAWLEY, Australia—The University of Western Australia hasannounced a new partnership. The University will be teaming up with SantaClara, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies, a leader in measurement technology.The partners have committed to a five-year collaboration for the development ofnew applications in life sciences, and the alliance will enhance theUniversity's local, national and international research and teaching alliancesthrough a variety of venues, including the Centre of Metabolomics, The ARCCentre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the University of WesternAustralia Comparative Analysis of Biomolecular Networks Research and TrainingCentre.

The University of Western Australia Centers have agreed totest Agilent platform technologies and applications in their efforts to advanceinternational training opportunities and further their research into some ofthe current industry's biggest challenges with regards to health, theenvironment and food production.

"[The infrastructure] will provide cutting-edgemetabolomics technology for use by many researchers in diverse areas throughoutUWA and the State," Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, director of theCentre for Metabolomics, said in a press release.

Agilent, through its Agilent Global Academia Program, hasalready donated a high-resolution mass spectrometer, for use in providingaccurate metabolomic analysis of molecules in complex samples. The company hasalso donated cash grants as part of the terms of the collaboration with the Universityof Western Australia. Researchers anticipate an increase in capability in avariety of research areas such as drug discovery and metabolism, innovativepathway mapping for diseases including cancer and diabetes, environmentalpollution characterization, food analysis and disease biomarker discovery.

"We see real benefit in supporting the UWA Centre forMetabolomics to provide the best quality metabolomics analysis to assistresearchers," Rod Minett, general manager of Life Sciences for Agilent in SouthAsia Pacific and Korea, said in a press release. "The LC-QTOF will give thiscentre advanced capability and allow the development of new applications tomeasure small molecules in many areas including biomedical science,environmental science, plant and oceans research."

Minett added that Agilent had formed a strong partnershipwith both researchers at the University of Western Australia and with thenational Metabolomics Australia network.

Agilent will make available additional assistance to the UWACentre for Metabolomics to support researchers by way of its experiencedapplications specialists in Australia and overseas.

The partnership is one of the more recent ones for Agilent.The company announced earlier in July that it had established a collaborationwith Samsung Medical Center, a leading medical institute of South Korea, formedicine and genetics research projects. Samsung Medical Center's Department ofLaboratory Medicine & Genetics Research, part of the Center for FutureMedicine, will utilize Agilent's bio-analytical instruments to analyze samplesand develop new clinical assays. The instrumentation that Samsung MedicalCenter will use of Agilent's is the Agilent 6530 Accurate-Mass Q-TOF LC/MS,which is capable of profiling, identifying, characterizing and quantifyingcompounds quickly and accurately, and the Agilent 6430 Triple Quadrupole LC/MSSystem, ideal for environments that require parts-per-trillion sensitivity.

SOURCE: UWA press release