Published: Earl & Ferrell et al., Nature Communications 2018


Congratulations to David Earl & Brent Ferrell, co-first authors, and co-author Nalin Leelatian for their work that just came out in Nature Communications!

Earl DC*, Ferrell PB*, Leelatian N, Froese J, Reisman B, Irish JM**, Bachmann BO**. Discovery of human cell selective effector molecules using single cell multiplexed activity metabolomics. Nature Communications DOI. *equal contribution. **co-corresponding authors.

► This peer-reviewed research developed out of a collaborative Vanderbilt University Discovery pilot grant that brought together the Irish lab’s expertise in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and single cell tools and the Bachmann lab’s expertise in identifying novel metabolite effectors.  This work created a novel single cell metabolomics platform that uses primary human tissue biopsies and applied it in AML to identify and characterize a novel natural product that selectively targets leukemia cells and spares non-malignant monocytes and lymphocytes from the bone marrow microenvironment.

2018 Earl and Ferrell et al. Figure 1
2018 Earl and Ferrell et al. Figure 1

This work was written up on the Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology (VICB) page here:

The Power of Multiplexed Activity Metabolomics
The Power of Multiplexed Activity Metabolomics
January 17, 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This work was also written up by Research News @ Vanderbilt:

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2018/05/01/looking-beyond-the-magic-bullet-approach-to-drug-discovery/

Bachmann, Irish, Ferrell, and Earl
The Team, from left to right: Jonathan Irish, David Earl, Brent Ferrell, the CyTOF mass cytometer, and Brian Bachmann (photo by John Russell/Vanderbilt University)

 

This work follows prior work from Garry Nolan’s lab by Peter Krutzik et al., Nature Chemical Biology 2008 (DOI), showing the power of the single cell chemical biology approach, and by Bernd Bodenmiller et al., Nature Biotechnology 2013 (DOI), developing mass cytometry assays for chemical biology.

For more information about using this system at Vanderbilt, please contact the Cancer & Immunology Core (CIC).