Facundo Fernández talks to Jennifer Newton about the fight against counterfeit drugs and whitewater kayaking

	Facundo Fernández is an assistant professor in the school of chemistry and biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, US. He is on the Analyst advisory editorial board and his research focuses on both instrumentation and the applications of bioanalytical mass spectrometry.

 

What inspired you to become a scientist?
I've always been very curious, even as a child. What really drove me to be a scientist is that it allows me to constantly answer new questions, push new boundaries and play with new instruments and techniques. In other words, the amount of freedom that one has is enormous, and it is pretty much impossible to get bored!

Can you tell me a little about your background?

I grew up in Argentina and carried out all my studies at the University of Buenos Aires. After that, I moved to the US to pursue a postdoc in Dick Zare's lab, at Stanford University, US. I had a very productive and fun time there. After a bit less than two years, I had to decide if I wanted to stay in the US or come back to Argentina, but the 2001 financial crisis in my home country basically made the decision for me. So I stayed in the US and took a second postdoc with Vicki Wysocki, at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where I also learned plenty of new things and interacted with fantastic scientists. Then I was hired at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I've been for the last five years. Here in Atlanta is where I also met my wife, Dara. We tied the knot last year.

Some of your work involves detecting fake drugs. How big a problem is pharmaceutical counterfeiting?
Everybody agrees it is a very large problem, but it is difficult to come up with hard numbers as it requires sampling multiple products all over the world in a statistically significant way. This is not a trivial task to pursue. We are trying to address part of the technical challenges associated with this issue by developing faster methods for determining their chemical composition using mass spectrometry.

You are researching direct analysis in real time (DART). Can you explain what this is?

DART is a technique invented by Robert Cody and co-workers which was first reported in the scientific literature in 2005. It is a direct ionisation method that operates in the open air and under atmospheric pressure conditions. In other words, a sample such as a pharmaceutical tablet can be directly analysed by simply placing it in front of the DART ion source, which is facing the mass spectrometer inlet. We have used it extensively to examine the quality of antimalarial drugs collected in south-east Asia. DART revealed the presence of a large number of wrong active ingredients in fake drugs. The concern is that some of these wrong ingredients may mask the symptoms of malaria without really curing it. Another concern is that some of these ingredients may stimulate parasite resistance. From the more fundamental point of view, we have been working on studying the factors that influence transmission of ions into the mass spectrometer during direct ionisation and the extent of internal energy deposited on DART ions during ionisation. This should help us develop better DART approaches with improved sensitivity and minimum fragmentation.

What other projects are you working on?
Too many! Some that I particularly enjoy involve imaging using ambient ionisation techniques. We have recently published an article where we imaged the surface of algae for identifying the regions in space where metabolites are excreted.¹ These metabolites have shown promise as new drugs to treat malaria, for example.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your work?
By far, seeing my students succeed and come up with good ideas of their own.

What's the trickiest problem you've had to overcome in your research? How did you solve it?
Research is, by definition, pushing the boundaries of our scientific and technological knowledge, so it is always quite tricky. The important thing is not to lose hope! In my own experience, one of the most challenging projects I worked on involved inducing fragmentation of ions generated by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionisation (MALDI) using collisions against a semi-conductive surface. This technique is known as surface-induced dissociation (SID). Performing SID on MALDI-generated ions involved modifying a MALDI spectrometer and re-tuning it so fragment ions would be effectively collected back into the ion optics. This was a very tricky experiment, with many days of complete frustration, but we made it work! I was a postdoc at the time and my advisor's trust and confidence is what kept us going.

What is the next big thing that you would like to tackle in your lab?
We are trying to find a rapid mass spectrometry diagnostic test for ovarian cancer. This promises to be another of those tricky projects!

What do you do in your spare time?
I enjoy many things, including watching movies (any kind), dancing salsa with my wife (she wants me to also learn ballroom dancing) and rock climbing. I recently took four days off and climbed, with a friend and fellow scientist, some beautiful limestone walls in Mexico. I also enjoy mountain biking with a colleague from the school of civil and environmental engineering, although he is much better than I am. More recently I started whitewater kayaking with my neighbour, as well as my own photoblog.

What achievement are you most proud of so far in your career?
I can think of two projects, very different from each other. The first one was at Stanford University, when we finally obtained good and stable signals with a newly developed Hadamard-transform time-of-flight mass spectrometer. The second achievement is when we used some of the analytical techniques developed in my lab to help in identifying a source where a large number of fake antimalarials were being produced.

If you had one piece of advice to pass on to young scientists, what would it be?
Do your best at balancing work and personal life. If you have to work a full weekend, make sure you take a rest day later on.