Clinical Mass Spectrometry—Achieving Prominence in Laboratory Medicine

[摘要] Once in a while an innovation comes along that has a dramatic and lasting impact on the field of laboratory medicine. Although introduced so long ago as to defy memory, the colorimeter/spectrophotometerchanged the way that laboratory tests were performed. In 1957 the autoanalyzer, the precursor to modern discrete working systems, was introduced. Imagine where we would be today without our rapid, random access instruments. In 1959 the first immunoassay, an RIA for insulin, was developed, which changed the way that large and small compounds were (and still are) measured.Thomas M. AnnesleyIn the same way that the above technologies changed the field, so has the introduction of mass spectrometry (MS).5 A Web of Science database search illustrates the expansion of MS in the scientific literature since the year 2000 (Fig. 1). The number of published articles that have included MS as part of the study has grown at a rate more than 3 times that of the total number of articles published during this time period.Fig. 1. Percent change in the number of publications from 2000 for the topic category “mass spectrometry” (closed circles) versus the percent change in all publications (open circles).Similarly, there has been a large expansion of use of MS in clinical laboratories. MS is being used for small molecules such as drugs, steroids, biogenic …

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学