04/18/2024 Congratulations to Marissa Romano (BS’2024) on accepting a Research Associate position in Analytical Technical Operations at Moderna.
04/02/2024 Congratulations to Daniel Heron on receiving two departmental awards: the Oliver Zajicek Memorial Scholarship in Chemistry and the Royal Society of Chemistry Certificate of Excellence. Both awards will be formally acknowledged at the Departmental Senior and Awards Dinner on Friday, May 3rd from 6:00-8:30pm in the Student Union Ballroom.
3/29/2024 Congratulations to Son, Hung and Daniil on the acceptance of their manuscript “Structural characterization of a pathogenic antibody underlying vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT)” for publication in Analytical Chemistry.
2/27/2024 Congratulations to Yang, Daniil and Yi on the acceptance of their manuscript “Molecular architecture and platelet-activating properties of small immune complexes assembled on heparin and platelet factor 4” for publication in Communications Biology.
1/29/2024 Congratulations to Mingxuan Zhang (PhD’ 2007) on becoming a Senior Director of Analytical Development and Quality Testing at Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, a global biopharmaceutical company that finds and delivers novel treatments for patients with a significant unmet need.
1/19/2024 Congratulations to Yang and Daniil on the acceptance of their manuscript “Characterization of large immune complexes with size exclusion chromatography and native mass spectrometry supplemented with gas phase ion chemistry” for publication in Analytical Chemistry. The paper exemplifies our long-term collaboration with medicinal chemists at PRISM (Proteogenomics Research Institute for Systems Medicine) in La Jolla, California.
12/15/2023 Farewell to Dan Favre who is leaving the lab upon the successful defense of his PhD dissertation to assume the role of a Research Scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb (New Brunswick, NJ) where he will use native MS and other state-of-the-art techniques he learned/helped develop in our lab to facilitate the discovery of new protein therapeutics.
12/07/2023 Dan will be defending his PhD dissertation “High Resolution Mass Spectrometry as a Platform for the Analysis of Polyoxidometalates, their Solution Phase Dynamics, and their Biological Interactions” on Thursday, December 7 at 2:00 pm EST in the Life Sciences Building room N210. Everyone is welcome to attend either in-person or remotely using the following link: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/91256860433 (you may need to login as “guest” to be able to use the remote option).
10/26/2023 Congratulations to Daniil and Yi on the acceptance of their manuscript “Reverse engineering of a pathogenic antibody reveals the molecular mechanism of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia” for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
09/17/2023 Congratulations to Daniel Heron on receiving a Commonwealth Honors College Research Grant to support his work on elucidating the role of heparin in modulating conformation and dynamics of platelet factor 4 (PF4) using hydrogen/deuterium exchange and mass spectrometry.
08/29/2023 Congratulations to Daniil Ivanov on receiving a William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation at today’s Chemistry ResearchFest.
08/24/2023 Congratulations to Dr. Wenhua Yang (a visiting student in 2015-2016 and a postdoctoral fellow in 2019-2021) on his latest career move – joining the ranks of Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering as an Associate Professor and a Distinguished Scholar. This follows a two-year stint at Yichun University as an Associate Professor. Another great news that just came in: Wenhua was successful in securing funding form the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which is an impressive accomplishments at this career stage!
06/30/2023 A manuscript “Reverse engineering of a pathogenic antibody reveals the molecular mechanism of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia” has been deposited to bioRxiv
06/09/2023 The 71-st ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics in Houston is finally over! The group members presented four posters and one talk.
The Houston Convention Center at night
a bird’s eye view of the posters/corporate booths hall
at the corporate booths
Yi obviously enjoys presenting his work…
… but Dan’s style is very different
Daniil gave both a talk…
… and a poster
Several generations of lab members and an old friend/collaborator. From left to right: Alex Johnson (MS’2014, currently at Visterra), Shunhai Wang (PhD’2013, currently at Regeneron), Igor Kaltashov, Pavel Bondarenko (Amgen), Daniil Ivanov, and Rinat Abzalimov (a post-doc in 2004-2008, currently at CUNY Biotechnology Center).
A late evening at one of the corporate hospitality suites.
05/28/2023 A manuscript “Structural characterization of a pathogenic antibody underlying vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT)” has been deposited to bioRxiv
02/11/2023 A manuscript “Molecular architecture and platelet-activating properties of small immune complexes assembled on intact heparin and their possible involvement in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia” has been deposited to bioRxiv
01/31/2023 A review of “Mass Spectrometry in Biopharmaceutical Analysis” has been published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. This detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis of the book has been written by two industry veterans, Iain Campuzano and Dhanashri Bagal (Amgen, Thousand Oaks, CA). Click here to read the entire review.
12/15/2022 Ruolan Cheng and Chau Tran, two first-year Chemistry PhD students, have joined the group.
11/25/2022 Congratulations to Daniil and Yang on the acceptance of their manuscript “Mass spectrometry-based methods to characterize highly heterogeneous biopharmaceuticals, vaccines and non-biological complex drugs at the intact-mass level” for publication in Mass Spectrometry Reviews
07/14/2022 Congratulations to Wenhua and Daniil on the acceptance of their manuscript “Extending the capabilities of intact-mass analyses to monoclonal immunoglobulins of the E-isotype (IgE)” for publication in mAbs.
07/05/2022 Congratulations to Yang Yang (PhD’2021) on his promotion to Scientist II at Biogen! This reflects his talent and productivity clearly demonstrated during the first nine months with the company following the defense of his dissertation and departure from our lab.
06/10/2022 Congratulations to Daniel and Jackson on the acceptance of their manuscript “Decavanadate interactions with the elements of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein highlight the potential role of electrostatics in disrupting the infectivity cycle” for publication in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry.
02/22/2022 Congratulations to Daniil on the acceptance of his manuscript “Rapid evaluation of the extent of haptoglobin glycosylation using orthogonal intact-mass MS approaches and multivariate analysis” for publication in Analytical Chemistry
02/13/2022 Congratulations to Daniel on the acceptance of his manuscript “Solution- and gas-phase behavior of decavanadate: implications for mass spectrometric analysis of redox-active polyoxidometalates” for publication in Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers.
01/26/2022 Dr. Si-Hung Le joined our group as a postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and most recently worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He will work on characterization of structure and antigen-binding properties of antibodies that are of interest in hematology.
01/15/2022 Kevin Cheung, a first-year Chemistry PhD student, has joined the group.
12/01/2021 “Mass Spectrometry in Biopharmaceutical Analysis” co-authored by Prof. Kaltashov and two former lab members, Dr. Shunhai Wang (PhD’2013) and Prof. Guanbo Wang (PhD’2013) has been published and is now available in an electronic format at the Publisher’s website. The hardcopy of the book will be available on December 6.
This monograph puts together both commonly used and emerging approaches that employ mass spectrometry to evaluate various aspects of biopharmaceutical products ranging from covalent structure and conformational analysis to their quantitation in complex biological matrices. Also considered are various approaches used for the purity assessment of biopharmaceutical products and the comparability/biosimilarity studies. While the focus is on protein therapeutics, other biopharmaceutical products are also covered, including oligonucleotide-based drugs and gene therapy products. The book draws on the authors’ combined four decades of experience in the field of biopharmaceutical analysis. The table of contents can be viewed here.
09/07/2021 Congratulations to Yang Yang on the successful defense of his PhD dissertation “Studies of heterogeneous macromolecules using novel mass spectrometry based approaches.” This event follows four years of hard work in the Chemistry PhD program at UMass-Amherst, publication of four peer-reviewed papers (on three of which Yang is the first author) and landing a job at Biogen (Scientist I, Technical Development). A video recording of Yang’s presentation will be posted here shortly.
08/04/2021 Congratulations to Guanbo Wang (PhD’2012) on joining the faculty ranks of the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center at Peking University (PKU). This moves follows several years of highly productive work at Nanjing as a Professor of Chemistry.
08/04/2021 Congratulations to Yang and Daniil on the acceptance of their manuscript “The challenge of structural heterogeneity in the native mass spectrometry studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein interactions of with its host cell-surface receptor” for publication in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.
07/29/2021 Congratulations to Mingxuan Zhang (PhD’ 2007) on becoming a Senior Director of Analytical Development at EQRx, a company devoted to making protein therapeutics more affordable for oncology patients who need them. This career move follows Mingxuan’s successful work as a Director of Large Molecule Analytical Development at GSK (GlaxoSmithKline).
07/21/2021 An overview of the lab’s work on developing novel analytical methods to characterize highly heterogeneous biopharmaceutical products was presented at the “Future Course of Mass Spectrometry” symposium of the Protein Engineering Summit (PEGS-2021). You can watch the entire presentation on our YouTube channel.
07/07/2021 Congratulations to Wenhua on the acceptance of his manuscript “A systematic assessment of structural heterogeneity and IgG/IgE-binding of ovalbumin” for publication in Food & Function.
06/01/2021 Congratulations to Chendi Niu (PhD’ 2020) on joining the AstraZeneca R&D team! This career move follows a year-long stint at Amgen as a post-doctoral fellow.
05/27/2021 Congratulations to Khaja Muneeruddin (PhD’ 2016) on his latest career move – joining the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a Research Scientist. This move follows a highly productive five-year stint at UMass Medical School, where Muneer was involved in a variety of projects and co-authored one paper in Science and one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his new position Muneer will be involved with developing and implementing mass spectrometry based assays to understand therapeutic biology and for early drug discovery.
05/06/2021 Farewell to Albert Flater (BS’2021), and congratulations on accepting a Research Associate position at Tessera Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA
05/05/2021 A manuscript “Simultaneous evaluation of a vaccine component micro-heterogeneity and conformational integrity using native mass spectrometry and limited charge reduction” co-authored with our collaborators at Pfizer has been accepted for publication at JASMS
04/15/2021 Please join us in welcoming our newest group member, Rohit Advani. Rohit graduated from the University of California in San Diego, where he studied Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Rohit will contribute to our efforts to discover the molecular biomarkers of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia using proteomics and bioinformatics tools.
04/08/2021 Congratulations to Wenhua on the acceptance of his manuscript Utilization of sonication-glycation to improve the functional properties of ovalbumin: A high-resolution mass spectrometry study for publication in Food Hydrocolloids
02/25/2021 Prof. Carol V. Robinson of Oxford University will give a Chemistry seminar this coming Thursday, Feb. 25th at 11:30 am EST. The title of her presentation will be “Protein complexes subjected to tandem mass spectrometry reveal allosteric binding partners.” Prof. Robinson is the Royal Society Research Professor at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford, as well as the Dr. Lee’s Professor of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, and a Professorial Fellow at Exeter College. Her research has pushed the limits of mass spectrometry, demonstrating that biopolymer complexes can be studied in the gas phase. In addition to having an illustrious career in academia, Dr. Robinson is co-founder and director of OMass Therapeutics, a University of Oxford spin-out company applying mass spectrometry technology to drug discovery. Her outstanding work won her multiple distinctions and awards, of which we will only mention her being appointed Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire in 2013, and elected a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2017. You can learn more about her current research work by visiting her group’s website at https://robinsonweb.chem.ox.ac.uk/home. Prof. Robinson is also a very engaging speaker, and you will absolutely love her seminar, so please join us this Thursday!
02/16/2021 Please join us in welcoming our newest group member, Daniil Ivanov. Daniil was recently awarded an M.S. degree in Molecular Biophysics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he was involved in a variety of projects, including MS imaging and quantitation of post-translational modifications in proteins and peptides. He will work on developing the recently introduced cross-path reactive chromatography (XP-RC) platform.
02/08/2021 Congratulations to Chendi and Yi on the acceptance of their manuscript “Towards better understanding of the heparin role in NETosis: feasibility of using native mass spectrometry to monitor interactions of neutrophil elastase with heparin oligomers” for publication in the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry
02/01/2021 Congratulations to Yang, Chendi and Cedric on the acceptance of their manuscript Charge manipulation using solution and gas-phase chemistry to facilitate analysis of highly heterogeneous protein complexes in native mass spectrometry for publication in Analytical Chemistry
01/12/2021 Congratulations to Shunhai Wang (PhD’2013) on his promotion to an Associate Director of Analytical Chemistry at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
12/24/2020 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our friends around the Globe!
12/14/2020 Congratulations to Mingxuan Zhang (PhD’ 2007) on becoming a Director of Large Molecule Analytical Development at GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), a move that follows a merger of GSK with Tesaro (where she was developing analytical plans to support late stage biological product development and product life-cycle management, and leading analytical activities including CQA assessment, product and process characterization and comparability studies).
09/16/2020 Congratulations to Adriana Kita (PhD’2014) on assuming a position of an Associate Director of Analytical Development at Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company committed to bringing to market novel products for the treatment of rare diseases, with a focus on serious, debilitating genetic diseases. This move follows seven years of highly productive work in the Analytical and Pharmaceutical Development at Alexion Pharmaceuticals.
09/06/2020 Congratulations to Ben Mohimen (PhD’2004) on assuming a position of the Head of Regulatory Affairs at Repare Therapeutics. Ben moves to the new position from Blueprint Medicines, where he was overseeing the process of gaining FDA approval for GAVRETO™ (pralsetinib), a treatment of metastatic RET fusion-positive non-small cell lung cancer.
08/18/2020 Congratulations to Dan Favre on receiving a William E. McEwen Fellowship Award for an Outstanding Poster Presentation at Chemistry ResearchFest-2020 ()
07/24/2020 Congratulations to Ho Yau (BS’2020) on accepting a position at Beam Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA
07/17/2020 Congratulations to Yang and Yi on the acceptance of their manuscript The utility of native MS for understanding the mechanism of action of repurposed therapeutics in COVID-19: heparin as a disruptor of the SARS-CoV-2 interaction with its host cell receptor for publication in Analytical Chemistry
06/11/2020 The manuscript describing the initial results of our CoV-2 related work (The utility of native MS for understanding the mechanism of action of repurposed therapeutics in COVID-19: heparin as a disruptor of the SARS-CoV-2 interaction with its host cell receptor) is now available on the bioRxiv site
06/03/2020 Farewell to Chendi Niu (who started working at Amgen) and to Miaowei Xu, who accepted a position at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
05/28/2020 Congratulations to Chendi Niu on successful defense of her PhD dissertation “Novel Mass Spectrometry Based Strategies to Study Heparin-Protein Interactions”
05/01/2020 The laboratory received a permission to carry out limited on-site work to study behavior of CoV-2 proteins enabling its entry to the host cells. We are very excited to start a new research project that will contribute to the global fight against COVID-19!
04/29/2020 Congratulations to Chendi, Yunlong, Cedric and Sergey on the acceptance of their paper “Identification of protein recognition elements within heparin chains using enzymatic foot-printing in solution and on-line SEC/MS” for publication in Analytical Chemistry
04/14/2020 Congratulations to Chendi and Yang: their paper “Platelet factor 4 interactions with short heparin oligomers: implications for folding and assembly” has been accepted for publication in Biophysical Journal
03/15/2020 Following the rise of COVID-2019 incidents in the Commonwealth and the state of emergency imposed by Governor Baker, a decision has been made to halt any lab work until further notice. Any visit to the lab requires PI’s permission, and strict safety measures should be taken during each such visit
02/28/2020 Congratulations to Yunlong Zhao: his paper “Evaluation of Top-Down Mass Spectrometry and Ion-Mobility Spectroscopy as a Means of Mapping Protein-Binding Motifs within Heparin Chains” has been published in Analyst!
01/24/2020 Happy New Year to all of our friends who follow the lunar calendar! May the Year of the Mouse bring you only success and happiness!
(helix Mickey is a creation of our alumnus Prof. Guanbo Wang)
09/19/2019 Yang Yang presented a poster and gave a research talk at the 16-th Symposium on Practical Applications of Mass Spectrometry in Biotechnology Industry in Chicago.
09/16/2019 Welcome back Chendi! Chendi Niu has returned to UMass-Amherst to continue her PhD work after completing a six-month long externship at Amgen.
09/09/2019 Please join us in welcoming our new group member, Dr. Wenhua Yang. Dr. Yang was recently awarded a D.E. degree (an engineering equivalent of PhD) in Food Science from Nanchang University, where he worked on identification of food allergens and understanding the mechanisms of immune reaction. He also holds a Master’s degree in Microbiology. He will work on application of the recently introduced cross-path reactive chromatography (XP-RC) to characterization of heterogeneous antibodies.
09/03/2019 Congratulations to Anton El Khoury and Chengfeng Ren on the acceptance of their manuscript “Ruthenium coordination preferences in imidazole-containing systems revealed by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and molecular modeling: possible cues for the surprising stability of the Ru(III)/tris(hydroxymethyl)-aminomethane/imidazole complexes” for publication in the Journal of Mass Spectrometry
09/01/2020 Congratulations to Alex Johnson (MS’2014), who has assumed a Scientist position at Visterra, a clinical stage biotechnology company committed to developing innovative antibody-based therapies for the treatment of patients with kidney diseases and other hard-to-treat diseases. This move follows five successful and productive years at Mersana Therapeutics.
08/27/2019 Dr. Ben Mohimen of CMC Blueprint Medicines (PhD’2004) delivered a keynote address at the Chemistry Research Fest reflecting on his time at UMass-Amherst and how it helped his career in BioPharma. Click here to download the entire presentation. Three posters were presented by the current group members (Miaowei Xu, Yang Yang and Daniel Favre) featuring their research projects.
08/22/2019 Congratulations to Hanwei Zhao on the successful defense of her PhD dissertation “Characterization of biodistribution of transferrin and receptor binding mechanism by mass spectrometry”
07/03/2019 Congratulations to Dr. Dmitry Gumerov (PhD’2003) on accepting a new leadership position in the bioteach/biopharma sector in the Greater Boston Area (as an Associate Director Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technology at Visterra)
06/06/2019 The 67-th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics in Atlanta is over, where four presentations had been made by our group members:
Please note that you have to be an ASMS member in good standing to see the presentations on the ASMS website.
05/14/2019 Congratulations to Cedric and Chengfeng on the acceptance of their manuscript EXPLOITING HIS-TAGS FOR ABSOLUTE QUANTITATION OF EXOGENOUS RECOMBINANT PROTEINS IN BIOLOGICAL MATRICES: RUTHENIUM AS A PROTEIN TRACER for publication in Analytical Chemistry.
04/19/2019 David Huang presented a poster at the Annual Chemistry Undergraduate Research Symposium event.
05/29/2018 Our lab’s work on characterization of protein therapeutics has been featured in a BioPharma webzine Technology Networks
11/01/2015 Our lab’s work on protein characterization with top-down H/D exchange (HDX MS/MS) has been featured in the November issue of The Scientist
