Targeted Blood Lipidomics of Colorectal Cancer: An HTC-18 Interview with Jef Focant

At HTC-18 in Leuven, Executive Editor of LCGC International, Alasdair Matheson, spoke to Jef Focant from the University of Liege about his talk entitled: “Targeted Blood Lipidomics of Colorectal Cancer”

Jean-François (Jef) Focant is Full Professor at the Chemistry Department at the University of Liege (ULiege) in Belgium. Expert in multidimensional GC coupled to MS, his team develops and validate analytical methods for the measurement of (semi)volatile molecules present in complex matrices. His Organic and Biological Analytical Chemistry Laboratory is known for its focus on solving real-life analytical challenges to serve the general society. The diversity of applications is very large and covers fields such as forensics, food control, archeology, and much more. Major recent activities include metabolomics, volatolomics, and breathomics, especially oriented to biomarker discovery in medical applications. The team also specializes in specific chemometric solutions for feature selections over large data sets from multi-class studies.

In this video interview, Focant discusses the following topics:

• You recently embarked on a project involving untargeted blood lipidomics for colorectal cancer treatment? How did this project arise and who did you collaborate with?
• Why did you decide multidimensional gas chromatography (GC x GC) was the technique of choice for lipidomics?
• Can you elaborate on the samples you are using and the sample preparation workflow?
• What analytical challenges did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
• What were your main findings?
• Are you planning to evolve this project further?
• Do you have any concluding comments on this project?